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Citation Map Shows Top Science Cities
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."
The points are close to being correct. The University of Minnesota is now apparently in one of the suburbs.
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.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
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?
Since when is psychology a science?
"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, 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 and location of publication. 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.
Sorry Southern US, maybe next year.
P.S. Austin, TX isn't in the south. It is San Francisco colonizing you.
Physics: http://www.leydesdorff.net/topcity/figure1.htm Chemistry: http://www.leydesdorff.net/topcity/figure2.htm Psychology: http://www.leydesdorff.net/topcity/figure1.htm And for the record, the authors refer to these as "fields of study", not "fields of science."
citation needed!
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.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Do NOT, I repeat do NOT, outsource any of the research or implementation of the Super Large Hadron Collider to anyone living in or around Moscow.
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.
Because everybody is innocent until proven guilty
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
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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?
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Poor Greenland :(. He has nothing.
Where are the biological sciences represented?
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.
--
make install -not war
In looking at the psychology map, I am suspicious that the authors made a minor error in their data collection. The database they used (Web of Science, Science Citation Index) does contain a category for psychology; however, it lists only the 71 psychology journals that are in the physiological/cognitive subfields of psychology. The overwhelming majority of psychology journals (almost 500 of them) are not in those fields, so the search should have also included the Social Science Citation Index data (also part of the Web of Science, just involves clicking another box). I suspect the authors only used the Science (and not Social Science) database because the data displayed on the map seems to over-represent programs that are strong in physio/cognitive, and under-represents (or ignores) programs that are strong in social, developmental, and clinical psychology.
Yes, but Rochester is awful.
they stated top papers only you idiot.
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.
Moscow and Kiev have big red circles on the physics maps. I wonder if it is an interesting case study to discover why. Is it a language barrier or are the publications not relevant enough. I personaly believe the issue is not the quality of the publications, russia (and former ussr) has allways produced great scientists.
Sig? Heil
Is this a SAT test question? Physics, Chemistry, and Psychology? Why not Voodoo or Phrenology?
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
that would be mathematically accurate, as baby's have equal rights, & only their parent(s) to faithfully represent them, as their uncle sam seems to be failing at even simple math anymore, like billionerrors?
You need to calibrate your sarcasm detector.
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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is that fair (not only bad math) to the babys who've yet to learn to steal & kill for money? they'd likely prefer to do stuff based on living, & being, useful to each other & us. see the difference? 0 errors so far. run that through your totalister.
Yet when looking at any other citation metric, OSU physics is near the top.
Is the only thing you can really conclude from the psychology map.
They obviously still have a few bugs to work out since Springfield MO does not house Mississippi State, just saying...
The dot labeled Santa Barbara is misplaced in Thousand Oaks......a considerable miss.
The University of Arizona is the 4th top ranked University for Analytical Chemistry, and important advances in solar cell research, organic LEDs (OLEDs), and CCDs for analytical use were pioneered here. Any such plot that does not include UA is obviously flawed, especially considering that Arizona State University was listed. ASU's Chemistry program is simply not of the same caliber.
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 same type.
Not his fault, he bought it on a red-circled city
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.
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.)
Maybe no one cited any of them.
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 Mathtype can do a nice, easy, job of formatting equations visually, and gets you all the spell checking and other functions of Word.
I work for an engineering department at a research university (doing computer support) and we see more Word usage than anything else. Some researchers still like TeX, but they are in the minority these days.
If you want to be a tough guy (hiding behind an AC post) about only TeX based papers being "real" scientific papers go ahead, however realize the world has moved on and left you behind.
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!
I wasn't aware there was a St. Petersberg so close to my house in Ohio.... but it shows up on 2 of the maps.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
You know you can stop now. Everybody knows that you did it.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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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Yeah bitches, 02138 and 02142 represent! All the rest are just punk posers!
No matter how much they protest that they are.
There seem to be some problems with the geographical data. The physics map shows a large red dot in St Petersburg, Ohio, USA, a town which does not exist. The psychology map shows a prominent red dot at the village of Glame on Raasay, a small island between Skye and the Scottish mainland. It's hard to imagine that as much psychology is published out of this village as in, say, Lund or Liège, where there are universities.
I was examining the physics page, zoomed into the US and saw a green circle in the middle of no where Georgia. Turns out the circle says Tblisi, the capitol of the country of Georgia.
Although MIT's and Harvards output is large on the maps...I would have thought they would have been putting out much more (both are combined into the Cambridge blip). Other state universities on the map have a fraction of the funding but put out comparable amounts of high quality papers according to the map.
Going on the map there are more nutjobs per-square-mile in the advanced west than the rest of the planet. link
If I live in New York, I might travel to a conference in Las Vegas, and publish in a journal that found a cheap office Iowa. Does that imply more science is done in Las Vegas? I think it just implies that conference organizers would rather hold conferences there. By this metric, the easiest way to get more science in your city is to give cheap property/tax breaks to publishers for having their offices there.
I notice on the map that Tblisi is shown in Georgia, which a quick search of Wikipedia will confirm. The problem is, this map shows Tblisi in GEORGIA (the state just north of Florida), not the Georgia that used to be part of the Soviet Union. I wonder if this paper was written in a geographically challenged city?
Do all the papers measured by this study get a cite? I say yes.
Would make it easier to job hunt!
I'm shocked to see Florence, Kentucky (home of the Creation Museum) isn't on the list.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/glenn-beck-rape-murder-hoax
I would have thought they might have published something. Hmmmm.