World citation and collaboration networks: uncovering the role of geography in science

By Raj Kumar Pan, Kimmo K. Kaski, Santo Fortunato. Scientific Reports, 2012

299 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Modern information and communication technologies, especially the Internet, have diminished the role of spatial distances and territorial boundaries on the access and transmissibility of information. This has enabled scientists for closer collaboration and internationalization. Nevertheless, geography remains an important factor affecting the dynamics of science. Here we present a systematic analysis of citation and collaboration networks between cities and countries, by assigning papers to the geographic locations of their authors’ affiliations. The citation flows as well as the collaboration strengths between cities decrease with the distance between them and follow gravity laws. In addition, the total research impact of a country grows linearly with the amount of national funding for research & development. However, the average impact reveals a peculiar threshold effect: the scientific output of a country may reach an impact larger than the world average only if the country invests more than about 100,000 USD per researcher annually.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be20f7efb7e93da1b84d55c7c716be6ec9279f8b

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Citations in the corpus

Learning Latent Block Structure in Weighted Networks (2014, background): “Vertices represent n = 226 nations on Earth, and each of the m = 20616 edges is weighted by a normalized count of academic papers whose author lists include that pair of nations [25].”
The science of science: from the perspective of complex systems (2017, background): “analyzed the role of geography in global citations and collaborations [453].”
Networks of innovators within and across borders. Evidence from patent data (2013, background): “…borders on the likelihood of collaboration (Ponds et al., 2007; Maggioni and Uberti, 2007; Scherngell and Barber, 2009; Frenken et al., 2009b; Hoekman et al., 2009, 2010; Scherngell and Barber, 2011; Scherngell and Hu, 2011; Scherngell and Lata, 2012; Pan et al., 2012; Hoekman et al., 2013).”