Collaboration range: Effects of geographical proximity on article impact

Spatial scientometrics studies how geography influences knowledge creation. In the recent years there has been a surge in this kind of studies, due to the increase of international collaborations. Most of the work in this field has been focused on the geographical distribution of researchers, whilst few have considered how proximity between coauthors influences research quality. In this work we leverage a dataset of geolocalized articles to assess the effect of geographical distance on article impact. More precisely, the dataset, provided by the Observatory of Science and Technology (O.S.T.), consists of roughly 10⁶ scientific articles, gathering all European articles written in 2000 and 2007, spanning 9 disciplines. We evaluate under which geographical extent coauthorships have higher probability of resulting in high impact articles (“high impact” is here approximated by “being in the top 10% most cited articles of its discipline”). We also describe spatial distribution of coauthorship, delineating geographical areas where the production is proportionally higher. The distribution is evaluated both in term of km (as the crow flies), and in terms of administrative partitions (authors’ cities, regions, countries).