Abstract
BackgroundThe relations between geographical proximity and spatial distance constitute a popular topic of concern. Thus, how geographical proximity affects scientific cooperation, and whether geographically proximate scientific cooperation activities in fact exhibit geographic scale features should be investigated.MethodologySelected statistics from the ISI database on cooperatively authored papers, the authors of which resided in 60 typical cites in China, and which were published in the years 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010, were used to establish matrices of geographic distance and cooperation levels between cities. By constructing a distance-cooperation model, the degree of scientific cooperation based on spatial distance was calculated. The relationship between geographical proximity and scientific cooperation, as well as changes in that relationship, was explored using the fitting function.Result(1) Instead of declining, the role of geographical proximity in inter-city scientific cooperation has increased gradually but significantly with the popularization of telecommunication technologies; (2) the relationship between geographical proximity and scientific cooperation has not followed a perfect declining curve, and at certain spatial scales, the distance-decay regularity does not work; (3) the Chinese scientific cooperation network gathers around different regional center cities, showing a trend towards a regional network; within this cooperation network the amount of inter-city cooperation occurring at close range increased greatly.ConclusionThe relationship between inter-city geographical distance and scientific cooperation has been enhanced and strengthened over time.
Highlights
In the 21st century, along with the development and popularization of new information and telecommunication technologies, the spatial scale of people’s outreach has greatly increased; the obstacles to communication offered by spatial distance have become weaker
Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, little scientific cooperation occurs between its cities and cities from the mainland due to the administrative jurisdiction; cities from Taiwan were not considered
Given that the relationship between geographical proximity and scientific cooperation cannot be derived from the spatial features of network evolution, further study of the spatial distance and the amount of cooperation was required
Summary
In the 21st century, along with the development and popularization of new information and telecommunication technologies, the spatial scale of people’s outreach has greatly increased; the obstacles to communication offered by spatial distance have become weaker. There are two views about the relationship between geographical proximity and spatial connection. One is that geographical space no longer plays a decisive role in actors’ communication, mainly because modern telecommunication and transportation technology can overcome spatial barriers in order to instead build scientific cooperation network. In order to avoid possible errors in the results in terms of the correlations between cooperation levels and distances, Urumqi and Lhasa are excluded from the numerical analysis. The relations between geographical proximity and spatial distance constitute a popular topic of concern. How geographical proximity affects scientific cooperation, and whether geographically proximate scientific cooperation activities exhibit geographic scale features should be investigated
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