

Mashups Reveal World's Top Scientific Cities - nopinsight
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26540/?p1=A6

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nopinsight
Looking at the maps, one might wonder if the level of personal connections
between researchers affect citation numbers somewhat. For groundbreaking
papers and useless ones, this may not be an issue, but the quality of most
papers are in between the two extremes. This may result in fewer citations for
papers from researchers in less connected areas of the world, noticeably
developing parts of Asia and Eastern Europe.

An alternative hypothesis is that papers from those locations are in fact of
lower quality. I think a debate is in order.

> Not least of these is the performance of Cambridge, MA, home to two of the
> world's top institutions in MIT and Harvard, which could reasonably be
> expected to feature strongly in the data. Yet, Cambridge, MA, does not
> appear at all.

I wonder why the author wrote down that paragraph despite obvious
contradictions in the maps. Cambridge, MA is featured prominently in the
Physics and Chemistry maps. It _is_ only missing from the Psychology map.

