  Global cities are defined, on the one hand, as the major command and control
centres of the world economy and, on the other hand, as the most significant
sites of the production of innovation. As command and control centres, they are
home to the headquarters of the most powerful MNCs of the global economy, while
as sites for the production of innovation they are supposed to be the most
important sites of corporate research and development (R&D) activities. In this
paper, we conduct a bibliometric analysis of the data located in the Scopus and
Forbes 2000 databases to reveal the correlation between the characteristics of
the above global city definitions. We explore which cities are the major
control points of the global corporate R&D (home city approach), and which
cities are the most important sites of corporate R&D activities (host city
approach). According to the home city approach we assign articles produced by
companies to cities where the decision-making headquarters are located (i.e. to
cities that control the companies' R&D activities), while according to the host
city approach we assign articles to cities where the R&D activities are
actually conducted. Given Sassen's global city concept, we expect global cities
to be both the leading home cities and host cities.
