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."
A typical symptom (Score:5, Funny)
This is a typical symptom of scientists/researchers having way too much free time on their hands. They need to find a way to spend it properly, or they will kill us all one day.
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I'm sure your God won't allow that to happen.
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We really need a glyph to indicate humor or sarcasm, since apparently some people wouldn't know it if it hit them in the face with a sledgehammer...
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Yeah, if only there was punctuation symbol widely acknowledged to indicate sarcasm!
Or, failing that, perhaps even a widely used convention would be nice. Or not. ;)
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All we need to do is educate Americans in proper English, classic reading as well as writing skills. Then they would be able to understand both humor and sarcasm. If the highlight of University courses in English is Shakespeare then we have lost.
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I would not say so.
That is what is the key factor in determining how much funding you get. The chart gives a good initial estimate of the likelihood for a site to produce a cited paper.
One comment however - the method used is skewed slightly against Russian and Chinese. These two countries still have a significant amount of stuff published in their native language journals and those tend to get less than average citations from abroad.
It is also surprising that places crippled by war and sanctions around ex
misleading metrics (Score:5, Interesting)
"Number of links" has always struck me as an odd metric (see also PageRank). The greatest work from the PoV of scientific advancement isn't necessarily the most cited. The greatest determinant will be how fashionable a particular field is - a few leading researchers in a particular field are likely to have a huge number of cites, especially if they constitently reach the well-known publications [plosone.org], but it doesn't necessarily mean the field is very scientifically interesting.
Then, even if great progress has been made, you get the effect that people don't necessarily cite the seminal investigations so much as the pioneering refiners.
Another interesting effect, of course, is the difference between provenance of researcher [fas.org] and location of publication [thomsonreuters.com]. The US and the UK are particularly good at draining other countries of already well-educated people, but this doesn't mean that the US or the UK have performed the academic preparation necessary to produce excellent researchers.
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... The US and the UK are particularly good at draining other countries of already well-educated people, but this doesn't mean that the US or the UK have performed the academic preparation necessary to produce excellent researchers.
Ah but it doesn't alter the location of the centers that are doing well. If you are interested in identifying places that are doing the best/most work then you don't caer if the people doing the work have come from somewhere else!
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Surely it is as interesting to find out what produces the excellent researchers as it is to find out what consumes them:
(i) from the PoV of improving education at home and abroad;
(ii) for countries with potential for local scientific growth to note where they are losing out and consider how to improve;
(iii) to perhaps produce a more distributed network of research centres rather than consolidating skills in a few dozen centres across the world. (Is so much centralisation necessary or even positive?)
In parti
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Besides, given the dismal job prospects of most science PhDs, Americans are often making a very rational choice to stay out of those fields. If you want to work yourself to death, medical or
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The first report that you linked to is very interesting -- thank you.
It provides an overview of non-U.S. citizens who were awarded doctorates in science and engineering, but there is no comparison against U.S. citizens provided, other than this little excerpt.
From the paper:
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The US and the UK are particularly good at draining other countries of already well-educated people, but this doesn't mean that the US or the UK have performed the academic preparation necessary to produce excellent researchers.
Cite needed.
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The part before the "but" is covered above.
The part after the "but" is a statement of logic: we cannot assume that a university in country X full of good researchers implies that country X provides good preparation for research (or any sort of good education). Are you asking for evidence that the US education system is not as good as its research output would speciously suggest?
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I think this is a generic problem with metrics: the things that are easy to measure do not necessarily correspond with the things you want to know. While citations have some relation to the scientific value of publications, it is not an extremely strong correlation. And since citations play a major role in performance evaluation of researchers, there is motivation to game the system.
On the other hand, you cannot directly measure some property that is not clearly defined. Is it better to measure something th
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If you read the paper or click on the maps you will actually see that they DO NOT CORRECT for local population density. So, the metric in question is absolute rather than "per capita" productivity. This doesn't entirely invalidate it, but it calls into question how you would verbalize or interpret the results.
I mean, if 8 of the top 10 cities for science *by any metric* are also 8 of the top 10 cities by population you have said something less interesting. These cities are already top cities for "being"
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If you read the paper or click on the maps you will actually see that they DO NOT CORRECT for local population density. So, the metric in question is absolute rather than "per capita" productivity. This doesn't entirely invalidate it, but it calls into question how you would verbalize or interpret the results.
Local population density is pretty irrelevant here, too, unless your question is "what is the probability that I will meet the author of a journal article while walking down the street?" (To be fair, that is something one might be interested in when choosing where to live, but even in large cities there are often university enclaves near campus.) If you put a university with ten thousand students in a city of a million people, all other things being equal there's no reason why its scientific output ough
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I actually was thinking of "what city would I like to live in". :-) You are correct that not all "capita"s are equally relevant and probably a total of grad students plus professors is a better denominator. Less refined census data than that is easier to come by, though. I do think that bigger cities support more schools and/or bigger graduate departments, other things being equal. So, in a vague statistical correlation sense just bulk census data gets you part of the way there.
If the real question is "
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If it is the place where the best people from around the world go to to work together, that is significant.
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CI is a bad indicator as a quality of a particular paper or a field but it's ok when applied to the whole science (not just a field, as you are saying).
The fact that a man has BMW does not mean that he is rich, but the fact that Moscow has N BMW's and Kiev has M is a significant indicator.
Northeast USA, represent! (Score:2)
Sorry Southern US, maybe next year.
P.S. Austin, TX isn't in the south. It is San Francisco colonizing you.
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.
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"It's its own separate, crazy entity."
Crazy like a Fox (News commentator)!
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Also, nobody colonizes Texas. Nobody. Except Mexico. But aside from them, nobody.
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Funny all my friends here in Austin say Houston is a nice place to be FROM...
Lobster? Seriously? Hipsters, yes. They'll grow up some day, but for now, they are far more tolerable than the inner-city crime associated with Houston.
There 1.5 million residents in Austin and surrounding area and about 50,000 UT students, most of whom are not Chemistry students, so that assessment is not valid either.
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Funny all my friends here in Austin say Houston is a nice place to be FROM...
Your hipster friends? :)
Besides, that smell in Houston? That's the smell of Money.
Lobster? Seriously? Hipsters, yes. They'll grow up some day, but for now, they are far more tolerable than the inner-city crime associated with Houston.
Well, it's a good thing most of the 4.5 million people in the greater Houston area don't live in the 'crime ridden' inner-city areas. Hipsters just annoy me, they don't actually seem to hurt much except productivity. Crime, on the other hand... well, if we weren't once considered a 'sanctuary city', I doubt it would be near as bad.
There 1.5 million residents in Austin and surrounding area and about 50,000 UT students, most of whom are not Chemistry students, so that assessment is not valid either.
Half was meant in an exaggerative manner. All that was meant by that statement was that Aus
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I'm 42. We don't have hipsters at my age. We are too young for hippies and too old for hipsters.
All I could smell in Houston was smog and humidity.
You are seriously the only person on the planet advocating Houston over Austin. For one, Houston is East Texas, which is the same thing as Louisiana.
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You are seriously the only person on the planet advocating Houston over Austin. For one, Houston is East Texas, which is the same thing as Louisiana.
I'm not advocating anything - merely pointing out my observations from my time in Austin. I was interested in moving there once. Then I wasn't. That simple. Your attitude throughout this is underpinning why - the Austinites I met had delusions of cultural grandeur mixed with disdain for everyone else who isn't as 'weird' as you all claim to be or refused to acknowledge the inherent superiority of everything Austin. Sure, it has things that make it interesting, but nothing on the scale that seems to exi
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Sorry Southern US, maybe next year.
P.S. Austin, TX isn't in the south. It is San Francisco colonizing you.
Hey at least Atlanta (GaTech primarily I'm guessing) is showing up well for Chemistry. Actually it would be neat to see something similar for other engineering and science fields. I'm real curious about computer science / math papers.
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I live in Austin. I ain't no South. The worst part about Austin, however, is it is surrounded by Texas.
The Maps (Score:4, Informative)
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If you like these maps, I did something similary with scientific collaboration. You can see it there http://olihb.com/2011/01/23/map-of-scientific-collaboration-between-researchers/ [olihb.com]
Pay attention CERN (Score:1)
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Word is for office girls (Score:2, Interesting)
In what software did they write the paper? Word 97? It is absolutly infuriating to see a scientific paper not written in TeX-based software.
Get over it (Score:3, Informative)
Word is now extremely standard in academics, including engineering and science disciplines. The reason is that what the researchers are interested in is actually getting their ideas out to the world, not proving they are toughguys by using TeX. What you use to create doesn't matter all that much since journals are very much saying "Give us a PDF," they don't really care how it was created. So you just choose what is easiest for you to do your paper in that looks good and can export to PDF. Word plus Mathtyp
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Word is now extremely standard in academics, including engineering and science disciplines.
It is common. It is not standard. It varies from discipline to discipline, and journal to journal.
not proving they are toughguys by using TeX.
You're biased. It is hardly being a "toughguy" to use TEX. Sounds like a marketing lowlife talking, trying to manipulate with emotion rather than argument.
however realize the world has moved on and left you behind.
It is not "moving on" to use a proprietary product in scien
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.
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It is infuriating because of the difference in output quality, not because Word is proprietary or whatever other reason. Can you guess how the first poster was able to know the article was typeset using Word ? The paragraphs of text are not justified, the 'fi' ligature are not made, formulas are awful, the link for figure 1 is separated from the picture by a page break, etc.
Actually, it is not actually Word's fault here, it is just a very badly typeset paper and one can do much better with Word.
I also didn'
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Not a scientist here, but are scientific papers actually expected to be justified? The APA (psychology) requires left alignment with NO justification, for readability.
Re:I'm not at all biased (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well most of the systems in the department, we manage, meaning that nobody but us has admin access. As such we know everything that gets installed on it. Also, because our boss is a really good guy and has done a good job creating a helpful environment, people tend to ask us for just about everything since it is easier for them. When you get a new computer just give IT a list and all your shit is there.
I've got a pretty good idea of the software usage in the department. Like I said, TeX is there. There are
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Renaming cities. (Score:2)
Is it a sign that our world is becoming too PC? Can't we still call it Fort Collins, and not just Collins? Is "Fort" too war-mongering for society today?
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University Park, PA is listed as "University."
Apparently a "park" is too play-mongering for these researchers so they renamed it.
[/sarcasm] seriously now, why would you jump to the conclusion anti-war political correctness was why the name was truncated?
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No IBM? (Score:2)
I looked at Yorktown Heights, NY (about 50 mi north of NYC), but saw no papers indicated. Yet that's IBM's main R&D center. I suspect the data is not properly representative.
Re:No IBM? (Score:4, Insightful)
IBM doesn't publish. They patent.
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IBM doesn't publish. They patent.
Wrong. I work for IBM and when I publish, I put my affiliation as everyone else (IBM Arg.). But sure, I also patent.
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Psychology Map May Be Incorrect (Score:3, Interesting)
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Cognitive scientist here (well, sort of...I deal in academic tests and metrics)...that's because cognition is the only important field of psychology ;-)
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Politically incorrect map (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder how long before someone slaps the map authors as being racist, as it is so obviously politically incorrect, with green largely clustered in US and Europe.
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You need to calibrate your sarcasm detector.
big red circles (Score:2)
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The Hungarian system is fairly critical, not really accepting of dishonesty. Then again, I'm in Political Science, so I can't speak for other fields.
I do know that in the past, we used to produce many high-quality scientists, who later emigrated to the West around the start of WWII, collectively termed "Martians", but since then, the educational system has gone downhill in quality, not quality control and rigor, just the material being taught to students. Hence the small, but very green circle of Budapest i
One of these things is not like the others. (Score:1)
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For those reading who aren't trolls: If you happen to think this way, then your definition of psychology probably comes from elementary school, TV, or a college intro course (which too often amounts to about the same thing). There are many branches of psychology; the least scientific of which seem to be the most well known to layfolk. Although I do agree that some fMRI studies of the brain can be pretty close to phrenology.
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Excellent, I'll risk providing nourishment for a troll just *once* more to show how this particular layfolk has illustrated my point. Psychologists are hardly at all related to psychiatrists, making that an ill-posed analogy. One branch of psychology is "clinical psychology". That branch deals with analysis and such and is what most people think of as "Psychology", and is indeed related to psychiatry. The rest of psychology, however, has nothing at all to do with that. So, the completion to the analogy may
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Well stated. Psychoanalysis is about as related to cognition as motorcycles are related to water bottles.
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There is no answer because the SAT no longer has an analogies section. (Certified College Board SAT test proctor here!)
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No but applying the scientific method to astrology demonstrates astrology is a crock of shit.
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.
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London girls are insecure (Score:3)
Is the only thing you can really conclude from the psychology map.
No Tucson (University of Arizona)? (Score:1)
Data display completly flawed (Score:1)
The data plotting is deeply flawed : when you go on the chemistry map (http://www.leydesdorff.net/topcity/figure2.htm) in France, the data about Nice (south East of France) displayed by hovering over the corresponding circle correspond to the town of Strasbourg (situated in the East of France, along the German border roughly at the same latitude than Paris).
And the data about Lille (north of France) corresponds to a town (Rueil Malmaison) situated in the suburbs of Paris. I found a couple other bugs of the
The city of Argonne? (Score:2)
I see lots of chemistry is done in Argonne Illinois. That's funny since Argonne is a lab, not a city. (Argonne National Laboratory.) Probably in Westmont. At least they got Batavia right (FNAL.)
wow, the trifecta of bad science (Score:2)
Misuse of statistical significance testing, false identification of measurements with high level concepts ("highly cited" = "high quality"), and the ecological fallacy, all rolled into one paper! That's quite an achievement!
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No, raw citation rates are worthless as a measure of quality. Furthermore, putting citation rates in relation to publication rates like this is also bogus.
As for the ecological fallacy, well, yes: a few highly cited individuals do not make an "important scientific center".
As for the abuse of statistical significance testing, you cannot use statistical significance to rank anything; it is mathematically wrong.
Is psychology a real science? (Score:2)
Going on the map there are more nutjobs per-square-mile in the advanced west than the rest of the planet. link [leydesdorff.net]
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I'm just asking if he did or not. If he didn't, then why doesn't he provide us proof?
Did you happen to check the story on Scientific Papers? Perhaps you'll find your proof there?
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if you repeat a BS thousand times, someone may quote you in a scientific paper, then it gets requoted and it becomes "verifable fact" for Wikipedia ... or court
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http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/glenn-beck-rape-murder-hoax [knowyourmeme.com]
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Re:Psychology? (Score:5, Funny)
Since when is psychology a science?
Hmm, someone seems to have issues with psychology. Would you like to talk about it? ;-)
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And when he's done, he'll offer you a free personality test.
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You are right, Psychology is just applied Biology.
Biology is applied Chemistry.
Chemistry is applied Physics.
And Physics is applied Mathematics.
So, anything outside of math is just derivative work.
From XKCD [xkcd.com], of course.
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Math is a structuring science, of a-priori knowledge. Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Psychology are a-posteriori (needing observations/verification with the real world), and each have a different focus.
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Yes, and language can be beautiful. To channel Hardy, mathematics is about ideas, and ways to represent ideas, which can be beautiful in and of itself. That it has any applications at all is quite incidental, and sometimes rather unfortunate. It takes away from the beauty of math (and I say this as someone who enjoys pure math as a hobby, with zero publications to my name in the subject -- doodling with ideas in the margins during meetings is a wonderful past time).
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So sorting my email (which requires math for comparisons) is a game of picking axioms or a language?
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Perhaps you should make some attempt to correct your limited view of the world, apparently constructed from an arm-chair. I'll give you a bit of advice, start by reading (seek information), and stop being a believer.
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It's more of a science than Political Science
And yes, I'm a Political Science graduate student(and have also dabbled in psychology in undergrad)
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Ironically, I'd say that qualitative poli sci and the philosophy of poli sci is a lot more robust than the quantitative approaches that seem to be in vogue these days.
When it comes to psychology, it is often the opposite -- but only for small, niche areas.
That said, there are seminal works in either category that are quite amazing, but those are few and far between.
Re:Psychology? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I certainly have enjoyed the psychometrics toolbox for Matlab as it contains useful drivers for some of Measurement Computing's DAQ interfaces under Mac OS X.
http://psychtoolbox.org/wikka.php?wakka=HomePage [psychtoolbox.org]
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Perhaps they used the author's home address for the map location when available? The data for southern Germany seems a bit strange, too. And the interactive map is rather crappy: no legend, no proper zooming, no apparent way to access the raw data associated with the points.
Horrible accuracy (Score:2)
One of the red hotspots is.... "St. Petersburg, Ohio".
If you zoom in, you will find out that's a road/cemetery by that name. Nothing else is there.