City collaboration

Read on the blog of Olivier Beauchesne 11 August 2014:

Olivier Beauchesne created a world map of scientific collaboration a few years ago. Last year he attempted to make a new one. Because most of the scientific papers are guarded, he worked with Scimago Lab feed, an active feed on social media. Scimago and he decided to collaborate. Great! His map shows the collaboration networks between researchers in different cities. It seems, he writes on his blog, that every researcher in every French city collaborates with at least a researcher in Paris. “Unsurprisingly, the map also shows quite clearly that the location (of) scientific institutions follows the population density.” Furthermore, he discovered close collaboration between cities and their former colonies. Paris is a star indeed. Next is Boston-New York. Tokyo and the Japanese cities show themselves. Seoul, Taipei, also very strong. Amsterdam too! Europe is dense, with Paris in a star-shaped network. The Eastcoast of the US is dense too, but more like a real network, a grid. So is Japan. The map looks like some spiderweb, silkworms that have weaven continents in cocoons.  There must be larvae hidden somewhere. Maybe a queen.

His next step was adopting the Louvain method. By using it, Beauchesne could identify global communities of scientists. Also these follow linguistic or old colonial lines. Fascinating stuff. Olivier presents himself on his website as “the lead data scientist at one of the largest online ad network.” I guess he is from Montreal. So living on the fringe of the networked collaboration of cities. What does it matter? He is able to make great maps! Best map of collaboration on a continental and global scale in the new knowledge based economy. Mind blowing!