Finding Stars: Mapping the Geography of the World’s Scientific Elites

Andres Rodriguez-Pose, Leiboyu Xiang and Neil Lee

No 2540, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: This paper presents the first systematic city-level mapping of global scientific talent, analysing the top 200,000 star scientists across 3,635 cities worldwide annually between 2019 and 2023. We use a novel Knowledge Generation Index (KGI) that combines researcher quantity with research impact to reveal extreme spatial concentration in knowledge production. Just four cities — New York, Boston, London and the San Francisco Bay Area — host 12% of the world's star scientists, while much of the Global South remains virtually excluded from frontier research. Beijing's ascent into the global top ten represents a rare challenge to established hierarchies. Our analysis uncovers striking disciplinary variations. Resource-intensive fields like clinical medicine cluster heavily and traditionally dispersed disciplines are increasingly gravitating toward major hubs. Despite these differences, concentration is intensifying across most scientific fields. Even the pandemic's remote collaboration experiment failed to level the playing field. Established innovation centres continued strengthening their advantages while peripheral regions fell further behind. Overall, we find that geography remains destiny, with profound implications for innovation policy confronting widening spatial inequalities in global scientific capacity.

Keywords: Star scientists; geography of knowledge; innovation agglomeration; spatial inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O25 O31 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-12, Revised 2025-12
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