Ruth’s Rankings Update – A Quick Take on Nature’s Research Hotspots and Their Populations

By Ruth A. Pagell*

(3 0ct 2020) Nature has taken the data from its 2020 rankings, using 2019 share data (fractional counting), to produce a ranking of the top 200 Science Cities. Nature Index does not include output in social sciences or arts and humanities, it uses the one metric, and is size-dependent. What is most interesting is the range of locations that are ranked. Some of the cities are obvious, such as Tokyo, since they are the largest cities in the world. Some, such as Paris, have long histories of being education centers. Others, in the 101-200 rankings include small U.S. college towns and research locations, such as Los Alamos, New Mexico with a population of 12,000. Given the decentralized landscape of U.S. research, it has twice as many cities as China and Germany, and with the U.K., these are the only countries with more than 10 cities.

 

This is another example of the increasing scientific footprint of mainland China. 21 of its 26 cities are in the top 100. Japan has six of its eight cities in the top 100, and the highest ranked of India’s four cities is 98. 29 of the U.S.’ 55 cities are in the top 100, for example.

 

Nature Index also ranks the top 50 cities in chemistry, life sciences, and physical sciences, and the top 25 in earth and environmental sciences. Beijing is tops in chemistry, physical sciences, and earth and environmental sciences and New York in life sciences. Eight cities are top five in the four categories:  China -Beijing (4), Nanjing (2) and Shanghai (1); U.S. San Francisco (4), New York (3), Boston (2), and Baltimore-Washington (2); and Tokyo (2). Note:  Numbers in brackets are the number of sciences in which they are ranked top five.

 

COMPARING POPULATION with NATURE INDEX RANKINGS

 

I thought it would be interesting to see if these rankings were size-dependent, based on population, and went looking for one list of rankings of world cities. After all the years I spent writing about international and demographic data, I should have known better.

 

There is no one “right” answer to what is the population of New York, for example. Data are collected at different times, since the census is not annual, updated population figures are estimates, and there are even different definitions of what is the city.

 

Nature Rank	City or Metropolitan Area from Nature list	Country	Population rank (1)	UN Metro Area (2)	US Cities (3)
1	Beijing	CN	9	8
2	New York metropolitan area	US	42	11	1
3	Boston metropolitan area	US	773		21
4	San Francisco-San Jose	US	618		16/10 (3a)
5	Shanghai	CN	3	3
6	Baltimore-Washington (DC)	US		77	30/20 (3a)
7	Tokyo metropolitan area	JP	1	1
8	Nanjing	CN	38	41
9	Paris metropolitan area	FR	26	28
10	Los Angeles metropolitan area	US	103	23	2
11	Chicago metropolitan area	US	175	39	3
12	Seoul metropolitan area	KR	33	34
13	Wuhan	CN	40	42
14	London metropolitan area	UK	35	37
15	Guangzhou	CN	21	22
16	Zurich	CH	364
17	Singapore (City-State)	SG	62	67
18	San Diego metropolitan area	US	348		8
19	Cambridge	UK
20	Hefei (home to U Sci Tech China)	CN	94
21	Philadelphia metropolitan area	US	311	68	6
22	Berlin metropolitan area	DE	121
23	Munich	DE	19
24	Tianjin	CN	19	20
25	Oxford	UK
26	Hangzhou	CN	46	50
27	Hong Kong	HK	47	48
28	Seattle metropolitan area	US	701		18
29	Houston metropolitan area	US	205	61	4
30	Melbourne	AU	78
31	Toronto	CA	60	63
32	Shenzhen	CN	24	25
33	Ann Arbor (MI)	US			236
34	Xi’an	CN		47
35	Lausanne	CH
36	Atlanta metropolitan area	US	1088	69	37
37	Chengdu	CN	36	40
38	Changchun	CN	89
39	Sydney	AU	79
40	Barcelona metropolitan area	SP	67	72
41	Changsha	CN	87
42	Madrid	SP	58	57
43	Boulder (CO)	US			291
44	Montreal metropolitan area	CA	96
45	Suzhou	CN	54	58
46	Kyoto	JP
47	Stockholm	SW	300
48	Copenhagen	DE	374
49	Vienna	AT	249
50	Ithaca (NY)	NY			>788 (3b)
OTHER	ASIAN CITIES, not China
52	Tsukuba	JP
53	Osaka	JP	10	10
58	Daejeon	KR	319
61	Nagoya metropolitan area	JP	34
77	Taipei	TW
95	Sendai	JP	209
97	Bengaluru (Bangalore)	IN	25	27
99	Kolkata metropolitan area	IN	15	16

 

World Cities – (1) using city data https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities

Many of the world’s cities with the most population are in developing countries. The population of many U.S. cities is much smaller than the metropolitan area. For example, the city of Atlanta has about 500 thousand people while the metropolitan area has over six million.

 

World Cities – (2) using metropolitan areas UN  World’s-Urbanization prospects Urban agglomerations with over 5 million inhabitants, July 2018   https://population.un.org/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2018-Highlights.pdf

 

US Cities – (3)  with population over 50,000   https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2010s-total-cities-and-towns.html

(3a) – rankings for the individual cities

(3b) – the population of Ithaca is 31,000

 

 

RESOURCES

Armitage, C. (Sep. 2020). The top cities for research in the Nature Index,  Nature Index, accessed at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02575-z

Ruth’s Rankings Update, August 2020 https://librarylearningspace.com/drowning-rankings-nature-cwts-qs-ruths-rankings-updates-2nd-quarter-2020/

For more information about Nature Index see:

https://librarylearningspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Appendix-A-Nature-Tables.pdf

 

Ruth’s Rankings

A list of Ruth’s Rankings and News Updates is here.

 

*Ruth A. Pagell is emeritus faculty librarian at Emory University.  After working at Emory she was the founding librarian of the Li Ka Shing Library at Singapore Management University and then adjunct faculty [teaching] in the Library and Information Science Program at the University of Hawaii.  She has written and spoken extensively on various aspects of librarianship, including contributing articles to ACCESS – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3238-9674