The Geography of Scientific Citation
The Institute of Scientific Information first produced a
list of the most highly cited scientists in 8 fields in 2001.
This has now been expanded to 14 fields where details of the
top 100 scientists by citation in each of these fields is
listed with the raw data being taken from an analysis of the
ISI's various citation counts. These are available from 1981
to date and are updated weekly. It is intended that this data
base be expanded to cover a much larger number of disciplines/fields
including the social sciences with up to 250 highly cited
individuals.
The data that is contained in the ISIHighlyCited data
base is based on the series from 1981 to 1999. This is the
data that we have examined with a view to exploring the geographical
distribution of these scientists. We can aggregate this data
by institution, place or location, and country. Or indeed
any other classification that we consider might yield interesting
patterns. Our focus here is on spatial or geographical distribution
because we are interested in the pattern of concentration
in the data. We consider that this is useful for judging the
extent to which specialisation has taken place geographically
as well as the extent to which the top universities and research
institutes dominate these fields.
We are also interested in the extent to which knowledge of
these patterns explain government policy in terms of concentrating
resources and we are interested in how the world is becoming
more or less concentrated geographically in terms of the knowledge
industries that these data relate to. This site simply gives
the data that we have assembled, and it presents the graphs
and maps that are associated with our work. We have written
a short note on the analysis and you can read this by clickin
on the icon at the top right of this panel.
Now go to our next page
where you will see the organisation of this site .........
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