Place is a complex concept that can be evoked in many ways, from a physical space (real or imaginary) to a place of understanding or even a social place (Lefebvre, 1991; Pillet Capdepón, 2004), through a multitude of quasi-synonymous terms (e.g., space, territory, location, area, site, landscape). The concept of place can differ significantly depending on the academic domain in which it is handled, be it geography, politics, history, law, sociology, psychology, etc. For this reason, and despite advances in technology and the development of geographic information systems (GIS) and their use in science (Longley et al., 2005), some authors have posited the lack of an overarching theory of place (Sui and Goodchild, 2011; Cresswell, 2014).

However, various attempts have been made to define place based on a consideration of its different uses. Agnew (1987), for example, identifies three fundamental components of the concept: i) location, i.e., an element with fixed objective coordinates about a given point; ii) locale, i.e., the material settings for social relations; and iii) sense of place, i.e., the subjective, emotional attachments people have to a place.

In the science of science, a pluralist sensibility towards the nature of science emerged with the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s seminal work (1962). From that date, the geographical perspective of science grew significantly, showing that “science is indelibly marked by the local and the spatial circumstances of its making” (Shapin, 1998), promoting the undertaking of studies that sought to determine the local or regional impact that science organizations (e.g., universities) have on development, thus linking science and location (Grossetti, 1995; Grossetti et al., 2007; Sterlacchini, 2008; Belenzon and Schankerman, 2013).

Subsequently, the development of pioneering bibliographic databases has enabled us to study different spatial aspects of science (Frenken et al., 2009) and represent science spatially through maps of science (Small and Garfield, 1985). The development of GIS, in turn, has made it possible to explore the intersection between bibliometrics and geographic information in greater depth (Xuemei et al., 2014) in what has become known as spatial bibliometrics (Frenken et al., 2009).

Spatial bibliometrics has facilitated the study of: i) the geographical distribution of scientists (Gaillard, 1991); ii) the geographical distribution of disciplines (Carvalho and Batty, 2006); iii) scientific productivity by place, including country-level (e.g., Zhou and Leydesdorff, 2006), city-level (Van Noorden, 2010; Eckert et al., 2013; Bornmann and De Moya-Anegón, 2019), institutional-level (Leydesdorff and Persson, 2010), and group-level (Cuyala, 2013; Maisonobe, 2013) analyses; iv) citation-based impact by place (Batty, 2003; Wuestman et al., 2019); v) research excellence (Bornmann et al., 2011; Bornmann and Waltman, 2011); vi) scientific collaboration, including conceptual (Cronin, 2008), methodological (Katz, 1994), and applied (Gazni et al., 2012; Hoekman et al., 2009) studies; vii) proximity, including its concept (Frenken et al., 2009) and effects (Ponds et al., 2007; Pan et al., 2012); viii) scientific mobility (Laudel, 2003; Robinson-Garcia et al., 2019), including the brain drain phenomenon (Laudel, 2003); ix) the geographical location of research funders (Grassano et al., 2017); x) the geopolitics of university rankings (Pietrucha, 2018); xi) attendance at scientific events (Van Dijk and Maier, 2006); xi) local and regional scholarly studies (Tijssen et al., 2006); xiii) science maps (Borner, 2010); and xiv) the multi-affiliation of authors (Halevi et al., 2023).

Although spatial bibliometrics has provided meta-science with a geographical perspective, the view is limited because its geographical information is extracted exclusively from an author’s institutional affiliation. However, scholarly publications contain other relevant geographical information in the metadata fields of their bibliographic records (Castro-Torres and Alburez-Gutiérrez, 2022; Miguel et al., 2024) and the main body of their texts (Acheson and Purves, 2021) that can provide insights into the place where a particular study has been conducted, the specific location where samples have been taken or analyzed, the area in which fieldwork has been performed, or the city where a study’s subjects have been interviewed or surveyed. Hence, the design of new Scientometrics indicators based on place mentions would allow researchers to measuring and gain insights into other aspects related to the influence of place on research and vice versa.

Publications concerned with the extraction of geographical information from scientific publications - beyond, that is, the authors’ affiliations - have garnered limited attention. Nevertheless, this body of literature exhibits a solid technical and experimental nature, and has occupied itself with a range of disciplines or scientific domains rich in such information, including orchards and cancer genetics (Acheson and Purves, 2021), food packaging (Lentschat, 2020), phylogeography (Weissenbacher et al., 2015; 2017; 2019), the life and earth sciences (Karl, 2019), geology (Leveling, 2015; Kmoch, 2018), biology (Scott et al., 2021), and ecology (Tamames and De Lorenzo, 2010; Martin et al., 2012; Karl et al., 2013). Among studies taking an information science (and bibliometric) approach, local science-oriented publications stand out at both national (Chinchilla-Rodríguez et al., 2015; Miguel et al., 2015; González et al., 2019; Miguel et al., 2023a) and regional (Arias and González, 2021) levels. Unlike publications based on authors’ affiliations, however, most of this body of literature lacks a scientometric conceptual basis, especially as regards the measurement of places using quantitative indicators.

A few attempts have been made to conceptualize place-mention analysis from a bibliometric perspective (Page, 2010; Eckert et al., 2013; Cascón-Katchadourian et al., 2023); however, these works generally employ basic metrics (e.g., the number of publications mentioning a place) and do not exhaustively exploit all extant place metrics. Thus, a general Scientometrics-inspired framework is necessary to situate the concept within quantitative science studies, integrating, in this way, traditional studies of authors’ affiliation and scientific collaboration with modern studies of place mentions.

Therefore, the present paper’s main objective is to propose and define a Scientometrics framework for the study of place mentions in the scientific literature that can serve as a baseline for future conceptual, methodological, or descriptive studies.

The framework employed herein was developed systematically from the study of the scientific literature, on the one hand, and from a review undertaken by experts and the authors of this paper, on the other. It was, moreover, constructed by exploiting a sequential point of view obtained in the following three stages: the identification of a place (through place mentions), the description of a place (in terms of its essential characteristics), and the measurement of a place (using bibliometric indicators).

In the identification stage, the scientific literature dedicated to the geoparsing of scholarly publications was taken into consideration - above all, the work of Acheson and Purves (2021) - as well as the literature oriented towards highlighting inconsistencies in authors’ institutional affiliations, e.g., Taşkın and Al (2014). Second, the description stage was concerned with identifying the attributes of a place. To this end, a brainstorming session was conducted among the authors of this paper - all of whom have extensive experience in publishing and reviewing scholarly publications - aimed at identifying these attributes and agreeing on classes for each attribute. The first author distilled all this information, which the other four debated, discussed, and edited. Finally, the measurement stage involved identifying areas based on geographical information (i.e., place mentions), establishing bibliographic relationships between authors, publications, and places (e.g., mentions, citations, co-citations, and bibliographic couplings), and assigning geographical relationships between places (e.g., local, national, regional, and international), via physical and institutional proximity estimations (Frenken et al., 2009).

The scientific literature on spatial bibliometrics (see Frenken et al., 2009) integrates affiliation-related indicators within this framework. Additionally, the concept of ‘heterogeneous couplings’ (Costas et al., 2021) was adopted to refer to the relationships between scholarly and non-scholarly publications when establishing the spatial relationship between two publications mentioning places.

The study of place in scholarly literature can be structured into three main blocks (Figure 1). The first block - presence, detected by place identification - is concerned with accurately identifying a place in a scholarly publication, paying particular attention to linguistic uses. The second block - that is, description, with a specific concern for the characteristics of place - is concerned with defining a place previously identified by employing a distinct set of attributes. Based on metrics, the third block establishes indicators that reflect other uses of a place in the scientific literature.

The three blocks making up this study of place (as depicted in Figure 1) are described in greater depth in the following subsections.

The above framework comprises three consecutive stages of identifying, describing, and measuring science places. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to formally and comprehensively define the use of place in scientific publications (i.e., integrating studies based on author affiliations, on the one hand, with studies based on the identification of place names in the text, on the other), and to propose specific indicators where place is explicitly measured as an independent entity (place-level metrics), thus expanding the notion of spatial bibliometrics (Frenken et al., 2009) and integrating the concept of heterogeneous couplings to consider place mentions between scholarly (including peer-reviewed publications and patents) and non-scholarly (e.g., press releases, clinical guidelines, policy reports, working papers) documents (Costas et al., 2021).

Although other place-mention roles or place metrics might be identified, our primary objective here is not to be exhaustive in the lists we have drawn up but rather to structure the different components on which the study of places is based and to situate them cognitively under the umbrella of Scientometrics. In so doing, observation, bibliographic review, and expert review have been carried out. Consequently, the findings need to be expanded and improved by undertaking further empirical and theoretical studies.

In the case of the place metrics proposed here, the following issues must be considered. First, to facilitate calculation, most of the indicators are based only on the primary affiliation of each author; however, there is a clear need to expand their coverage by considering the multiple affiliations of each co-author. Second, the problems created by institutions with numerous headquarters (in some instances located in different regions and cities) must be addressed since this adds considerable complexity to the computation of some indicators. Third, we have included author-, publication-, and place-level metrics; however, other aggregations, including journals, groups, or universities, should also be studied. Fourth, the indicators address content explicitly mentioned within a publication (zones A, B, and C); however, metadata containing other geographical information (e.g., a publisher’s location) may be equally interesting. Fifth, usage metrics (e.g., downloads from specific locations) are not included in the proposal (see supplementary material) and should be specifically developed in future research.

However, the calculation of some place-related indicators is computationally complex, entailing not only the collection of multiple affiliations but also the establishment of a geographical relationship (e.g., affiliation with affiliation, affiliation with place-mention, and place-mention with place-mention) both for cited and citing publications, and for scholarly and non-scholarly publications. To this, we should add the complexity of correctly identifying each place name, which can be challenging even for formatted data included in the authors’ affiliations (Eckert et al., 2013).

Meta-researchers and geographers interested in determining the role played by place in scientific activity; researchers seeking to identify key locations in their disciplines; research evaluators wishing to gain insights into the local/international role of authors, publications and journals; and, practitioners and librarians involved in developing bibliographic products may all have an interest in consulting place metrics and can fruitfully exploit the model proposed in this work. To obtain these place-related metrics, their first source of information is the publication itself, with mentions of place appearing explicitly and implicitly throughout the publication in zones A, B, and C (Figure 2). In this way, they can identify the places that refer to the authors’ affiliations as well as those that might appear in the title, abstract, keywords, body of the work, notes, acknowledgments, and annexes. Their second source of information is the metadata of each publication, curated by publishers, repositories, or bibliographic databases. Mentions of places might appear primarily as toponyms (e.g., Norway) and demonyms (e.g., Norwegian), independently or as part of proper names (e.g., Norwegian University of Science and Technology).

Having obtained the geographical information, each place can then be identified by parsing the publication’s full text and harvesting its bibliographic metadata. The use of place authority lists, gazetteers and thesauri is recommended to merge variants (e.g., London is equal to Londres), establish whole-part relationships (e.g., Paris belongs to France), and to confirm official nomenclature. Likewise, the use of administrative and geodesic place codes (e.g., Mapcode) is also recommended to ensure unique identification of each place. Each place mention should then be characterized. In some instances, this task may be automated (e.g., the section in which the mention appears), but, in others, human intervention is required (e.g., to determine the role of the mention). Each characterized place mention should next be allocated to a citing/cited entity (e.g., author, publication, and place). GIS are needed here to describe places more robustly as well as determine the geographical relationship between two places (e.g., local, regional, national, international). Academic identifiers (e.g., ROR, ORCID, DOI) are also required to assign places to authors, institutions, and publications accurately. OpenAlex natively includes ROR identifiers, and other bibliographic databases are likely to incorporate them gradually.

The following considerations should be taken into account when assigning place mentions to citing/cited agents. Given a work A, published by author B (affiliated in C), which cites a work by author D (affiliated in E), all mentions of places located in zone A will be considered citing affiliations. If there is more than one, the geographical relationship between the different affiliations of the same author will be used to calculate multi-affiliation. In contrast, the geographical relationship between the affiliations of the various authors, if any, will be used to calculate collaboration. On the other hand, all places mentioned in zones B and C will be considered cited places. The citing agent will be assigned to the publication (i.e., the place is cited by work A), each author (i.e., the place is mentioned by author B), and each citing affiliation (i.e., the place is mentioned by affiliation C). Finally, the affiliations of the authors cited in zone C will be considered cited affiliations, mentioned by the work (i.e., affiliation E is mentioned by work A), each author (i.e., affiliation E is mentioned by author A), and each citing affiliation (i.e., affiliation E is mentioned by affiliation C). In all these cases, the mention date corresponds with work A's publication date.

The metrics can be obtained from ad hoc applications (operating from a collection of full texts imported into the system) or they can be directly provided by bibliographic databases, using their entire coverage of publications, thus facilitating the embedding of this information in publication-level metrics, author/ journal profiles, and new place profiles. While the full model requires the application to access the complete text of each publication, many indicators can be calculated on the basis of the information included in affiliations, titles, abstracts, and keywords, and which is already included in the metadata.

Journals could usefully provide authors with explicit guidelines to ensure places are mentioned in a standardized, unequivocal way and, in this way, help researchers in their studies of place, especially in some specific disciplines (e.g., history, geography, urbanism, zoology, archaeology, geology, and regional studies). Similarly, the inclusion of a section listing uniformly and unambiguously all places referenced in a publication would facilitate the automatic extraction of this information. This task could be further facilitated if HTML versions of manuscripts employed geo meta tags for extracting toponyms and demonyms. Finally, repositories could also request geographic information from authors when depositing their manuscripts as a means of generating geo metadata.

Although applications have already been developed that perform part of these tasks - above all, the identification of toponyms, their resolution and the calculation of basic metrics (Eckert et al., 2013; Acheson and Purves, 2021; Cascón-Katchadourian et al., 2023), there is no application currently available that allows toponyms to be identified accurately without human intervention (Gritta et al., 2018) or that permits all the indicators proposed and defined in the supplementary material of this work to be calculated on a large scale. There is, thus, a pressing need to design and test tools that facilitate the data collection and analysis of the place-related metrics embedded in the conceptual framework proposed in this work.

This work has proposed a Scientometrics-inspired framework for integrating different studies of geographical place in the scientific literature (i.e., extended spatial Bibliometrics). Its primary contributions include the identification and description of the main attributes of a place (e.g., location, nomenclature, method, geographical scope, and, especially, place mention roles) and the bibliographic relationships between elements containing geographical information according to the zone in which they are located in the scholarly work, that is, the SFBR model developed herein. The SFBR allows the integration of geographical and bibliographic information, strengthening the identification, description, and testing of new place-oriented bibliometric indicators. Thus, we have proposed 57 bibliometric place-based indicators, divided into author-, publication-, and place-level metrics.

Some indicators may not be prevalent, relevant in corpora with particular characteristics, or applicable only in specific fields. For this reason, future studies should be devised to test the bibliometric properties of these indicators, especially when we are concerned with determining disciplinary differences in the use of places, the local dimension of an author concerning a process of evaluation, the contribution of a place to scientific endeavor or the use of a place for the development of a particular line of research.

Place-based metrics could be used to assess the spatial profile of authors, institutions, publications, journals, and disciplines; facilitate the development of new bibliographic applications; perform quantitative analyses of places (e.g., studies of infra/supra-analyzed places in the scientific literature); generate new place networks (relationships between locations outside the recognized networks of collaboration), provide place-based search features (i.e., bibliographic products that can track publications by the places they mention); study science traditions (i.e., the use and style of places mentioned depending on the scientific field), unveil the reasons underpinning the mention of each location; support local research (i.e., how particular places have contributed to specific research lines and how research has influenced particular areas); and, facilitate the deployment of public policies seeking territorial development. Specific research is needed to design the most appropriate methods that can address these issues within the spatial framework proposed in this work for identifying bibliographic relationships.