'World's Top Scientific Cities'

Want to know the best cities in the world to do research? Over at the Physics arXiv blog, KFC might have an answer. Lutz Bornmann at the Max Planck Society in Munich and the University of Amsterdam's Loet Leydesdorff have come up with a new approach for "evaluating the scientific performance of cities," KFC says. "They take the total number of papers cited by researchers from a particular city and then count how many of these appear in the top 10 percent of cited papers. … They then compare the expected number of top papers from a city with the actual number. Finally, they plot the results on a map, showing cities that have more than expected highly cited papers in dark green and those with fewer than expected in red. The bigger the dots, the more papers that are involved." The researchers have done this for physics, chemistry, and psychology, so far. Although there are limitations to the technique, KFC adds, "mashups" like this can help researchers visualize data on a given city's scientific performance before deciding if they want to work there.