The Changing Geography of Scientific Knowledge Production: Evidence from the Metropolitan area Level

The metropolitan areas act as incubators of new knowledge, and play a central role in the process of scientific knowledge production. On the basis of highly cited papers data, this paper adopts spatial scientometrics and social network analysis to investigate the geography, position and link of science cities between 2007 and 2017. The results are demonstrated below: (1) The two seemingly paradoxical trends, the regional concentration and global spread, coexist in the process of knowledge production, which are rapidly reshaping the global pattern of science. (2) The whole knowledge collaboration network has been dominated by the Global North cities, while the rise of the Global South cities has an increasing influence in the network, both driving the evolution of the world order. (3) The number of scientific collaborations between cities has increased dramatically, while domestic collaborations have higher strength than international collaborations. Finally, we discuss the limitations of this study and set out three directions in the future research agenda of knowledge production.