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

We 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 case study, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) project, 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. International 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 topics 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. This is a longer and re-worked version of a paper presented at the 10 ISKO international conference, 5-8 August, Montréal, 2008.