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Christian Wichmann Matthiessen, Annette Winkel Schwarz and Søren Find Research is by definition an innovative and creative activity, and as such in itself a driver of urban growth. Interaction between researchers in different cities further enhances creativity as researchers work together to improve their performance. We claim that researchers from different cities work together to improve their output and that the result of collective work is greater than the sum of individual efforts. Research co-operation contributes to the status of a given city and, when added up, it demonstrates the nodal position of the centres in question. Co-authorships thus represent connectivity, and wellconnected research cities are likely to be important cities in the global economy; nodality in research often corresponds to nodality in other parts of the local economy. Based on earlier work (see, for example, Matthiessen and Andersson, 1992), this analysis is a continuation of our research on the global system of knowledge centres. Such centres are defined as urban regions as used in a number of earlier papers (Matthiessen and Schwarz, 1999; Matthiessen et al., 2000, 2002a, 2002b, 2006, 2010). Matthiessen and Andersson (1992) identified the major European research centres and analysed the composition of research for each city by classifying total research output by disciplines. Multivariate statistical methods made it possible to identify different types of research cities. Later papers (Matthiessen and Schwarz, 1999; Mathiessen et al., 2000, 2002a, 2002b) used a global approach, analysing the changing performance of the world’s major research centres. In those...