
TL;DR
This paper demonstrates that universities exhibit urban-like nonlinear scaling in research output and impact, with deviations explained by local properties such as field composition and quality, paralleling city socioeconomic scaling.
Contribution
It reveals that university scaling behaviors mirror urban scaling laws and identifies local factors influencing deviations, advancing understanding of research productivity patterns.
Findings
Universities show power law scaling similar to cities in citations and publications.
Deviations from scaling laws are explained by local properties like field composition and impact.
Top universities' scaling exponents are comparable to urban scaling exponents.
Abstract
Recent studies of urban scaling show that important socioeconomic city characteristics such as wealth and innovation capacity exhibit a nonlinear, particularly a power law scaling with population size. These nonlinear effects are common to all cities, with similar power law exponents. These findings mean that the larger the city, the more disproportionally they are places of wealth and innovation. Local properties of cities cause a deviation from the expected behavior as predicted by the power law scaling. In this paper we demonstrate that universities show a similar behavior as cities in the distribution of the gross university income in terms of total number of citations over size in terms of total number of publications. Moreover, the power law exponents for university scaling are comparable to those for urban scaling. We find that deviations from the expected behavior can indeed be…
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