NETSCITY: a platform for geospatial exploration of scientific data

NETSCITY is the product of a collaboration with two CNRS laboratories in the field of social sciences and humanities:

In Toulouse: LISST UMR 5193, interdisciplinary laboratory on solidarity, societies and territories
In Paris: Géographie-cités UMR 8504

Popularised presentation in french: CNRS Info of 23/03/2020 entitled ‘Un outil pour cartographier la recherche’ (A tool for mapping research)

Users

20 unique visitors per week on average. 67% of users were from France, with the remainder coming mainly from the USA, Germany, Mexico and Switzerland.

Some users told us that they use NETSCITY for scientific monitoring and to make their institution’s results more visible (French Embassy in the USA, École des Ponts, INRAE, Université de Bordeaux, etc.).

Colleagues at IRIT have used NETSCITY to visualise production sites in their field of study:

Balaguer, M., Pommée, T., Farinas, J., Pinquier, J., Woisard, V., & Speyer, R. (2020). Effects of oral and oropharyngeal cancer on speech intelligibility using acoustic analysis: Systematic review. Head & Neck, 42(1), 111–130. https://doi.org/10.1002/hed.25949

NETSCITY is also being used for ongoing social science research on scientific activities, for example:

Farkhad Alimukhamedov’s post-doctoral work at LaSSP (Institut d’Études Politiques de Toulouse and Labex SMS 2018-2020) on the growth of scientific activity in Central Asia.
Research by Myriam Saadé, a post-doctoral student at the Université Gustave Eiffel, and Romain Boistel, a documentalist at the École des Ponts, on the field of life cycle analysis: mapping of places active in this field and spatial dissemination of the theme.

Finally, NETSCITY will be mobilised as part of IRIT’s scientometry mission, cf. an analysis of the geography of IRIT’s partnerships presented at the MESRI-DGRI Publimétriques mission seminar in January 2021 (http://perso.obspm.fr/daniel.egret/Publimetriques/).

Positioning the platform in relation to existing platforms (local and national)

NETSCITY aims to make reproducible and improve methods for processing and spatially locating postal addresses contained in bibliographic metadata. NETSCITY enables scientific affiliation data to be geocoded, spatially aggregated into comparable urban areas on a global scale for the study of academic activities, the choice of a method for counting co-publication data (split or whole count), the visual representation of the results of this processing in the form of graphs, maps and networks that can be downloaded and explored interactively, and the export of the tables resulting from these analyses (geographical coordinates, volume of publications per place and per year, etc.).

Some parts of the services offered by NETSCITY can be carried out using third-party tools/packages (e.g. https://bibliometrix.org), but the geographical processing proposed by NETSCITY is not available elsewhere on an open access basis.

Technical and organisational description, utilisation rate

The data is stored on the laboratory’s Oracle server. The NETSCITY web interface is coded using the CodeIgniter PHP framework, based on the Model-View-Controller design pattern. The various graphical visualisations use the capabilities of client-side JavaScript libraries: D3, AmCharts, VisNetwork. 4/