Mapping the efficiency of international scientific collaboration between cities worldwide

Abstract

International scientific collaboration, a fundamental phenomenon of science, has been studied from several perspectives for decades. In the spatial aspect of science, cities have generally been considered by their publication output or by their citation impact. Only a minority of scientometric studies focus on exploring collaboration patterns of cities. In this visualisation, we go beyond the 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 7718 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.