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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."
"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? ;-)