The Needlessly Inscrutable Geography of Scientific Funding

Cities are the engines of innovation. While repeated so often that it has become a cliché, the wisdom behind this is predicated on the power of cities to aggregate people, allow for collaboration, the cross-pollination of ideas, and the spread of information. One of the places where this most often occurs is within the walls of the research university.

We know that cities produce an inordinate amount of scientific output. The science journal Nature even devoted a special issue to the importance of cities and their relationship to science. We know many of the outputs of science at the city level (such as papers and citations), and even some of the inputs (such as the number of students and researchers), but there is one area where data are lacking: the amount of science-related funding that a given city pulls in.