Slick Data Visualization Reveals Scientific Collaborations Taking Place Around the Globe

A few years ago, dig­i­tal human­ists at Stan­ford mapped the Repub­lic of Let­ters, care­ful­ly detail­ing the social net­works that con­nect­ed thinkers dur­ing the Enlight­en­ment of the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry. Now Olivi­er Beauch­esne, a data sci­en­tist in Cana­da, has used data visu­al­iza­tion tech­niques to map out a more mod­ern set of rela­tion­ships — col­lab­o­ra­tions tak­ing place among sci­en­tists across the globe.

What’s an exam­ple of such a col­lab­o­ra­tion? Beauch­esne writes: “If a UCLA researcher pub­lished a paper with a col­league at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo, this would cre­ate an instance of col­lab­o­ra­tion between Los Ange­les and Tokyo.” By check­ing out this cool zoomable map, you can see thou­sands of these col­lab­o­ra­tions tak­ing place world­wide between 2005 and 2009, and pret­ty soon you real­ize the extent to which mod­ern sci­ence is an inter­na­tion­al affair. The data was pulled from Sci­ence-Metrix data­base.

H/T Pavel

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