2006/03/31 by Rui Carvalho, Michael Batty
Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #physics.data-an #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1742-5468/2006/10/p10012
published as J. Stat. Mech. (2006) P10012 · 6 pages, 3 figures; minor changes
arxiv created 2006/10/20 · openalex publication_date 2006/10/25 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Here we extract the geographical addresses of authors in the Citeseer database of computer science papers. We show that the productivity of research centres in the United States follows a power-law regime, apart from the most productive centres for which we do not have enough data to reach definite conclusions. To investigate the spatial distribution of computer science research centres in the United States, we compute the two-point correlation function of the spatial point process and show that the observed power laws do not disappear even when we change the physical representation from geographical space to cartogram space. Our work suggests that the effect of physical location poses a challenge to ongoing efforts to develop realistic models of scientific productivity. We propose that the introduction of a fine scale geography may lead to more sophisticated indicators of scientific output.