by Andres Oppenheimer
The highly respected Nature Scientific Reports journal has just published a map of the world's leading science cities, and it looks pretty bad for emerging countries: It shows the planet's northern hemisphere full of lights, and the south almost solidly dark.
The map is especially significant because it's not a subjective opinion by the magazine's publishers. Far from it: It's a study of more than 450,000 scientific articles and citations from more than 2,000 cities world-wide published in
The map shows that, despite a continued U.S. technological supremacy, the U.S. share of international academic physics papers has fallen from 86 percent in the 1960s to less than 37 percent now. There is a "delocalization of knowledge producers," it says.
Within
But there are no Latin American or African cities among the top 100 science-producing cities. According to Nature's Scientific Reports article, 56 percent of the top 100 scientific cities are in
Upon reading these figures, I called Dr.
One of the explanations may be that Latin American universities are pretty good in humanities, but relatively not that great in science and engineering, according to a separate ranking of the world's best universities by subject that was released last week by QS World University Rankings, one of the most influential international university indexes.
There are three Latin American universities among the world's best 50 in Philosophy (
It shows that despite all the talk about the rise of emerging countries, and despite the fact that science is becoming more geographically distributed globally, the gap between the world's scientific "haves" and "have-nots" is not narrowing much.
That's bad news, because we are in a knowledge-based global economy, in which science and engineering increasingly determine the wealth of nations.
"In the past, science was a reflection of countries' wealth. Now, science is a producer of wealth," Florida said.
My opinion: The new map of the world's leading science cities should be hung in all Latin American universities and public buildings.
It would serve as a great reality check to counter many of the region's presidents' outlandish claims that their countries are becoming world-class science centers, and that their universities are among the world's best.
True,
And it's also true that many Latin American scientists - mostly individually - are excelling in the world's leading universities. But most of them are excelling outside their native countries.
The map of the world's leading science cities should serve as a powerful reminder of the phenomenal challenge facing countries in the region to join the ranks of the world's leading science centers. Making it visible everywhere in the region would be a powerful remedy against complacency, and an urgent call to action.
World's 10 Leading Science Cities:
Orsay, France
Source: Nature Scientific Reports journal