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Universities Scale Like Cities  
 
<https://portal.fsw.leidenuniv.nl/exchweb/bin/,DanaInfo=.aftyh1h68+redir.asp
?URL=http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.5124> http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.5124


Anthony F. J. van Raan
<https://portal.fsw.leidenuniv.nl/find/nlin/1/au:+Raan_A/0/1/0/all/0/,DanaIn
fo=.aaszlzEuyo+1> 

 

Abstract: 

Recent studies of urban scaling show that important socioeconomic city
characteristics such as wealth and innovation capacity exhibit a nonlinear,
particularly a power law scaling with population size. These nonlinear
effects are common to all cities, with similar power law exponents. These
findings mean that the larger the city, the more disproportionally they are
places of wealth and innovation. Local properties of cities cause a
deviation from the expected behavior as predicted by the power law scaling.
In this paper we demonstrate that universities show a similar behavior as
cities in the distribution of the 'gross university income' in terms of
total number of citations over 'size' in terms of total number of
publications. Moreover, the power law exponents for university scaling are
comparable to those for urban scaling. We find that deviations from the
expected behavior can indeed be explained by specific local properties of
universities, particularly the field-specific composition of a university,
and its quality in terms of field-normalized citation impact. By studying
both the set of the 500 largest universities worldwide and a specific subset
of these 500 universities -- the top-100 European universities -- we are
also able to distinguish between properties of universities with as well as
without selection of one specific local property, the quality of a
university in terms of its average field-normalized citation impact. It also
reveals an interesting observation concerning the working of a crucial
property in networked systems, preferential attachment. 

 

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