The impact of geographic location on the development of a specialty field. A case study on Sloan Digital Sky Survey in Astronomy.

Abstract

International audienceWe analyze the scientific discourse of researchers in a specialty field in Astronomy by examining the influence that geographic location may have on the development of this field. Using as a case study the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) pro- ject, we analyzed texts from bibliographic records along three geographic axes: US-only publications, non-US publications and international collaboration. Each geographic region reflected authors affiliated to research institutions in that region. Interna- tional collaboration refers to papers published by both US-based and non-US based institutions. Through clustering of domain terms used in titles and abstracts fields of the bibliographic records, we were able to automatically identify the topology of to- pics peculiar to each geographic region and identify the research topics common to the three geographic zones. The results showed that US-only and non-US research in SDSS shared more commonalities with international collaboration than with one another, thus indicating that the former two focused on rather distinct topics