Scientists do not operate in a vacuum, and neither do they operate independent of where they are. Collaborations often begin because scientists have chance interactions, and many researchers form groups defined by their locations.

Using this fundamental insight as a starting point, a team of researchers in Finland set out to understand this in a detailed fashion. In a paper posted to the arXiv entitled "World citation and collaboration networks: uncovering the role of geography in science," the researchers explore how science and geography are interrelated at the country and city levels.

I'll just highlight a few findings, because there is a lot in this paper:

We have performed the first comprehensive study of citation and collaborative interactions between different geographic locationss. We used one of the world’s largest citation databases to derive the citation and the collaboration network, i.e. weighted networks where nodes are cities and links are citations and collaborations between the corresponding cities.

For example, looking at the level of cities, through the use of latitude and longitude data, the researchers found that "the probability that there is a link between two cities in the collaboration network decreases as a power law as the distance between the two cities increases."

Going a bit larger-scale, they also explored science at the national and global level. For example, they looked at the relationship between the outcomes of research and the level of funding:

The authors conclude:

Citation and collaboration streams between distinct locationss are strongly correlated, with an approximately linear relation. An increase in the number of collaborations between two cities is then expected to be followed by a proportional increase in the flow of citations between the cities. This is justified from the fact the people/groups working in similar fields and subject area are more likely to cite as well as collaborate with each other, and also suggests a natural bias towards self-citation, of which we have provided strong quantitative evidence. From the point of view of scientific impact, it pays off for a team to put together several institutions with a strong international participation. As a consequence, we expect to observe an increasing tendency to form large teams with members of many different countries in the future.

Want to play at home? You can find the datasets used in the analyses here.

Top image:DonkeyHotey/Flickr/CC