  Corporate research and development (R&D) activities have long been highly
concentrated in a handful of world cities. This is due to the fact that these
cities (e.g., Tokyo, New York, London, and Paris) are home to the largest and
most powerful transnational corporations and are globally important sites for
innovative start-up firms that operate in the fastest growing industries.
However, in tandem with the rapid technological changes of our age, corporate
R&D activities have shifted towards newly emerging and now globally significant
R&D centres, like San Jose, San Francisco, and Boston in the United States, and
Beijing, Seoul, and Shenzhen in East Asia. In this paper, I will conduct a
bibliometric analysis to define which cities are centres of corporate R&D
activities, how different industries influence their performance, and what
spatial tendencies characterise the period from 1980 to 2014. The bibliometric
analysis is based upon an assumption that implies there is a close connection
between the number of scientific articles published by a given firm and the
volume of its R&D activity. Results show that firms headquartered in Tokyo, New
York, London, and Paris published the largest combined number of scientific
articles in the period from 1980 to 2014, but that the growth rate of the
annual output of scientific articles was much greater in Boston, San Jose,
Beijing, and Seoul, as well as some Taiwanese cities. Furthermore, it can also
be seen that those cities that have the largest number of articles; i.e., that
can be considered as the most significant sites of corporate R&D in which firms
operate in fast-growing industries, are primarily in the pharmaceutical and
information technology industries. For these reasons, some mid-sized cities
that are home to globally significant pharmaceutical or information technology
firms are also top corporate R&D hubs.
