Finding stars: mapping the geography of the world’s scientific elites

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Neil Lee and Leiboyu Xiang

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This paper presents the first systematic city‐level mapping of global scientific talent, analysing the top 200,000 star scientists across 3635 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 10 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 towards 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: geography of knowledge; innovation agglomeration; spatial inequality; star scientists (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-12-17
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Published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 17, December, 2025. ISSN: 0020-2754

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