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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."
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!
"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.
Since when is psychology a science?
Hmm, someone seems to have issues with psychology. Would you like to talk about it? ;-)
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."
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
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Since it used the scientific method? Don't take my word for it - try reading some papers on working memory, psychophysics or the statistics of psychometrics to realise that psychs have to have a stronger understanding of the scientific method than most other scientists. FYI, read the real papers not the type of nonsense that comes from critical analysis.
bang goes my karma... again...
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
IBM doesn't publish. They patent.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
Is the only thing you can really conclude from the psychology map.
If the scientific method discovered that there was actual substance to astrology, then it would be a science. (But it doesn't, so it's not.)
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.
Without physics, mathematics is only a game of picking some axioms to see what they do, or worse, just a language.
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.