Mapping the efficiency of international scientific collaboration between cities worldwide

TL;DR

This paper visualizes and analyzes international scientific collaboration patterns among 245 cities, revealing that US-Europe collaborations tend to produce more highly cited papers than Asian collaborations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel visualization approach to map collaboration efficiency considering both quantity and impact of scientific papers across cities.

Findings

US-Europe collaborations are more efficient in producing highly cited papers.

245 cities are analyzed with 7,718 collaboration links.

Asian collaborations are less efficient in citation impact.

Abstract

International scientific collaboration, a fundamental phenomenon of science, has been studied from several perspectives for decades. In the spatial aspect of science of science, cities have been considered by their publication output or by their citation impact. In this visualization, we go beyond these well-known approaches and map international scientific collaboration patterns of the most prominent science hubs considering both the quantity and the impact of papers produced in the collaboration. The analysis involves 245 cities and the collaboration matrix contains a total number of 7,718 international collaboration links. Results show that US-Europe co-publication links are more efficient in terms of producing highly cited papers than those international links that Asian cities have built in scientific collaboration.