Categorical and Geographical Separation in Science

We study scientific collaboration at the level of universities. The scope of this study is to answer two fundamental questions: (i) can one indicate a category (i.e., a scientific discipline) that has the greatest impact on the rank of the university and (ii) do the best universities collaborate with the best ones only? Restricting ourselves to the 100 best universities from the year 2009 we show how the number of publications in certain categories correlates with the university rank. Strikingly, the expected negative trend is not observed in all cases – for some categories even positive values are obtained. After applying Principal Component Analysis we observe clear categorical separation of scientific disciplines, dividing the papers into almost separate clusters connected to natural sciences, medicine and arts and humanities. Moreover, using complex networks analysis, we give hints that the scientific collaboration is still embedded in the physical space and the number of common papers decays with the geographical distance between them.