Citation Map Shows Top Science Cities 167
mikejuk writes "Which cities around the world produce not just the most but the best scientific papers? Using a database and Google Maps the answer is obvious. A paper at Physics arXiv describes how two researchers combined citation data with Google maps to create a plot showing how important cities around the world were in terms of their contribution to physics, chemistry or psychology."
Offtopic, I know (Score:4, Insightful)
P.S. Austin, TX isn't in the south. It is San Francisco colonizing you.
Every Southerner would agree with you. In fact, most Southerns believe that Texas isn't even in the South. It's its own separate, crazy entity.
Re:Psychology? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No IBM? (Score:4, Insightful)
IBM doesn't publish. They patent.
Language? (Score:2, Insightful)
Moscow's Physics and Chemistry papers would be IN RUSSIAN. Hence they would not be as commonly cited by English authors. Hence the large red circle on Moscow. Different language != poor quality research.
I'm not at all biased (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't give a shit. My job isn't selling software, it isn't publishing papers, it isn't writing papers. It is supporting computers of people who write papers. A side effect of this job is that I get to see what software they need. Our top requested apps (to the point they are part of the standard install)? Word and Matlab. TeX is not on that list. That isn't to say it is gone, just that it is in minority use. The people who need it request it special (usually MikTeX and Winedt).
The other software highly requested, though less now, is Acrobat, the full thing, to turn documents in to PDFs to go to the journals. These days the Word users tend to just use the included MS plugin, though some still like the full Acrobat. All the TeX types use Acrobat because it makes conversion real easy (you just print to the distiller and it makes a PDF of it). For the few grad students that use TeX it is usually CutePDF since that's free and generally does fine with PDF generation.
The reason for my "tough guy" remark is his attitude that it is "infuriating" to see something written in anything but TeX. This has the attitude of "I spent all this time learning it, everyone else should have to to! You aren't a REAL man unless you do!" The content should matter, not the tool, to someone who actually cares about what is being said and isn't being silly about it.
Times change. Deal with it. If you don't like Word because it is proprietary (by the way if you think that is the only proprietary thing used in research you are in for a nasty, nasty, surprise) then maybe you need to work on an open tool that is just as easy to use. The researchers aren't interested in OSS zealot arguments, they are interested in getting their shit done and for many of them Word is easier. If there were a free tool that was as good, perhaps they'd be interested in that. Never met the researcher that didn't want to save a dollar whenever they can.
Don't just bitch though because you spent time learning TeX and are mad that others don't have to.
Re:I'm not at all biased (Score:5, Insightful)