Finding stars: mapping the geography of the world's scientific elites
Neil Lee, Andres Rodriguez-Pose and Leiboyu Xiang
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.
? 2025 The Author(s). Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers).
17 December 2025
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2025
https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105025249192
This Journal article is published under the centre's Urban programme.