Top Cities for Science Innovation
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Researchers Lutz Bornmann and Loet Leydesdorff recently published a paper whose results are maps displaying the relative numbers of science papers each city of origin has cited by other science papers. Chemistry, physics, and psychology categories are given. A detailed explanation of how the maps are generated is provided, including how circle sizes are calculated and how colors are assigned, based on statistical analysis. If the observed value is greater than the expected value, green is assigned. If the observed value is less than the expected value, red is assigned. Where is that huge red circle? Moscow. Its size means the number of published papers from Moscow relative to the number of papers that cite those papers is high; i.e., Muscovites do a lot of writing citing other sources, but not many writers cite papers from Muscovites. A big green circle is what you really want - like Cambridge, Mass. (not Cambridge, Idaho, as plotted), which is home to MIT, Harvard, and U. Mass, as well as many high-tech, highly published companies like Raytheon and Skyworks. Other big producers in the U.S. are Chicago/Urbana, Ill. (Motorola, Fermilab), and Berkely (Silicon Valley). In Europe, London (Cambridge U.) is the stand-out performer, with Paris, France, and Munich, Germany, following. Hefei, China, with three national physics laboratories, beats out even Hong Kong. The Tokyo region of Japan dominates the Pacific island realm, while Singapore rules SE Asia. It is worth taking a couple minutes to read through the paper ("Which cities produce worldwide excellent papers more than can be expected? A new mapping approach—using Google Maps—based on statistical significance testing") to learn how the creators arrived at the maps.

Map of Cities with Largest Number of Cited Physics Papers

View original map at hhttp://www.leydesdorff.net/topcity/figure1.htm

I tried using the provided data file at http://www.leydesdorff.net/maps/inp_gps.txt as input for the GPS Visualizer program from Google, but the result (see below) was not what is presented by the authors... so I gave up.