Original title: The Geography of Research: The Trade-Off Between Knowledge Production and Access
Sitian Liu, Yichen Su · August 2026
Scientific research creates local benefits, but in the U.S., research hubs no longer match where most people live. Major universities remain stuck in older cities, while the population has shifted elsewhere. Moving researchers closer to big population centers could share knowledge with more people. However, researchers might produce less work if they leave top institutions. The authors analyzed publication records to see how much a researcher's location actually affects their work. They discovered that a scientist's specific institution strongly boosts their output, but the surrounding research cluster matters less. Finally, they found that shifting some researchers into large cities that lack research could raise total overall output. The small loss in scientific output is easily outweighed by gains from sharing knowledge more widely.
Imagine a group of chefs all working in one old kitchen downtown. Their cooking is excellent because they share ingredients and techniques. But most of the customers have moved to the suburbs, so few people get to taste their food. If you move some chefs to a new kitchen near the customers, they might cook a bit less efficiently at first, but many more people get to eat well. Here, the chefs are researchers, the old kitchen is legacy research institutions, and the customers are the population. The paper shows that moving a few chefs to new kitchens can feed more people without ruining the quality of the food.
Policymakers deciding where to invest in research face a trade-off: placing researchers near population centers improves local access to knowledge but might reduce overall output if top researchers are less productive elsewhere. This paper shows that the loss from moving researchers is smaller than expected, so small shifts toward underserved metro areas could benefit both access and total output. That matters for how we think about funding research hubs versus spreading talent.
The abstract only examines marginal reallocations, not large-scale moves. The evidence for external cluster effects is weak, so benefits from moving researchers to new clusters are uncertain. The instrumental-variables approach relies on assumptions that may not hold. The analysis is limited to the U.S. and may not generalize to other countries.
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The Geography of Research: The Trade-Off Between Knowledge Production and Access — Sitian Liu, Yichen Su
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.