Denis Eckert

Cities and the geographical deconcentration of scientific activity: A multilevel analysis of publications (1987-2007)

Most current scientific policies incorporate debates on cities and the geographic organisation of scientific activity. Research on ‘world cities’ develops the idea that interconnected agglomerations can better take advantage of international competition. Thus, the increasing concentration of activities in these cities at the expense of others could be observed by certain scholars using measures based on scientific publications. Others, however, show that an opposite trend is emerging: the largest cities are undergoing a relative decline in a country’s scientific activities. To go beyond this seeming contradiction, this paper provides a global analysis of all countries with papers in the Web of Science over the period 1987–2007. The author’s addresses were geocoded and grouped into agglomerations. Registering of papers was based on the fractional counting of multi-authored publications, and the results are unambiguous: deconcentration is the dominant trend both globally and within countries, with some exceptions for which explanations are suggested.

The world network of scientific collaborations between cities: domestic or international dynamics?

An earlier publication (Grossetti et al., 2014) has established that we are attending a decreasing concentration of scientific activities within “world-cities”. Given that more and more cities and countries are contributing to the world production of knowledge, this article analyses the evolution of the world collaboration network both at the domestic and international levels during the 2000s. Using data from the Science Citation Index Expanded, scientific authors’ addresses are geo-localized and grouped by urban areas. Our data suggests that interurban collaborations within countries increased together with international linkages. In most countries, domestic collaborations increased faster than international collaborations. Even among the top collaborating cities, sometimes referred to as “world cities”, the share of domestic collaborations has gained momentum. Our results suggest that, contrary to common beliefs about the globalization process, national systems of research have been strengthening during the 2000s.

The global geography of scientific visibility: a deconcentration process (1999–2011)

This article aims to ascertain whether the territorial redistribution observed in the geography of scientific production between 1999 and 2008 translated into a redistribution of the geography of citations, and therefore of scientific visibility. Are publications from formerly marginal locations able to influence researchers based in “central locations”, or is their impact mostly “provincial”? Because the distribution of citations is extremely asymmetrical, it could very well be that the geographic de-concentration of production activities did not lead to the geographic de-concentration of citations, but instead contributed to creating increasingly asymmetrical flows of information for the benefit of “central” cities and countries. This article aims to verify whether this is the case by analysing the geographic distribution of citations received, using a method for localising the publications indexed in the Web of Science by urban areas. Results show a growing convergence between the geography of scientific production and that of scientific citations. The number of citations received by the world’s 30 top publishing countries and cities tended to edge closer to the global average. While Singapore, China, India and Iran suffered from a deficit of visibility in 2000, their level considerably improved by 2007. Moreover, a decrease in the discrepancy between cities’ scientific visibility is observed in almost all countries of the world, except for three: Sweden, Egypt and Denmark. To finish, our results show that the gap between the share of citations and the share of publications has decreased across all disciplines. A significant asymmetry in favour of English-speaking countries has remained in the distribution of citations in humanities and social sciences (but it is diminishing).

Four commonly held beliefs about the geography of scientific activities

Recent years have seen policies of ‘scientific development’ develop in various countries. These policies aim mainly at differentiating the means allocated to universities (or other institutions) based on ‘diagnoses’ and assessments rooted in beliefs concerning the spatial dimension of higher education activities and research. These representations may be regarded as ‘commonly held beliefs’ governed by the idea of an inevitable increase in hierarchical differentiations between cities, the existence of ‘critical mass’ effects imposed by a strengthening globalization, and ‘competitive’ scientific activity. Based on bibliometric research, our results show that those beliefs are often wrong. Though scientific activity is indeed highly centralized, the current trend is towards diversification and de-concentration rather than towards a reinforcement of the most important centers. The spatial concentration of researchers has no specific effect on their individual productivity. National contexts are not fading; they are merely being combined with the growth of international collaborations in a global context characterized by the decline of publications signed by a single person or a single team.