Contours of transformations of the geographical structure of think tanks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article is devoted to the geographical study of the phenomenon of think tanks. From the standpoint of the historical and geographical approach, the stages of its spatial diffusion are assessed, and a noticeable acceleration of the process has been noted since the last quarter of the XX century. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of the spatial regrouping of forces in the world expert and analytical community in the early XXI century based on data from the international program “Analytical Centers and Civil Society”. Territorial shifts are analyzed in two categories of structures—with basic functions and the largest organizations with global prestige, and on three scales—at the level of macroregions, countries and cities. The significant predominance of the former sets the main “visible” trends in the development and transformation of the main parameters of the geographical structure of the international expert and analytical community. Due to the spatial unevenness of the growth of analytical centers, a fairly high level of their territorial concentration remains, with a noticeable decrease in territorial differentiation and a change in territorial composition along the path to polycentrism due to the emergence of new “poles of growth” in the Global South. Based on quantitative indicators, modern models of the formation of thought factories in the countries of the world are proposed, and their grouping is given. Analytical centers with basic functions are becoming a widespread phenomenon and a necessary attribute of a large city; their elite is very limited and concentrated in select centers. 174 such structures are based in 89 cities in 55 countries. 2/5 of them are concentrated in European megacities, 1/4 each in America and Asia, and less than 1/10 in other regions of the world. Their actual location is determined primarily by the metropolitan area factor. Taking into account the level of concentration of the world’s leading think tanks, several categories of expert and analytical centers have been identified: the largest (Washington), large (London, New Delhi), medium-sized (Beijing, Brussels), small (28 cities) and emerging (141 cities). Despite the obvious resources of the think tanks in increasing the country’s international importance and authority, Russia is still lagging behind, and is represented only by Moscow in the world ranking of expert and analytical centers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".