Mapping the Diffusion of Information Among Major U.S. Research Institutions
Katy Börner, Shashikant Penumarthy, Mark Meiss, Weimao Ke · 2005
This paper reports the results of a large scale data analysis that aims to identify the information production and consumption among top research institutions in the United States. A 20-year publication data set was analyzed to identify the 500 most cited research institutions and spatiotemporal changes in their inter-citation patterns. A novel approach to analyzing the dual role of institutions as information producers and consumers and to study the diffusion of information among them is introduced. A geographic visualization metaphor is used to visually depict the production and consumption of knowledge. The highest producers and their consumers as well as the highest consumers and their producers are identified and mapped. Surprisingly, the introduction of the Internet does not seem to affect the distance over which information diffuses as manifested by citation links. The citation linkages between institutions fall off with the distance between them, and there is a strong linear relationship between the log of the citation counts and the log of the distance. The paper concludes with a discussion of these results and an outlook for future work. This is a revised and extended version of a paper that was originally presented at the 10th International Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics in