  Research collaborations, especially long-distance and cross-border
collaborations, have become increasingly prevalent worldwide. Recent studies
highlighted the significant role of research leadership in collaborations.
However, existing measures of the research leadership do not take into account
the intensity of leadership in the co-authorship network. More importantly, the
spatial features, which influence the collaboration patterns and research
outcomes, have not been incorporated in measuring the research leadership. To
fill the gap, we construct an institution-level weighted co-authorship network
that has two types of weight on the edges: the intensity of collaborations and
the spatial score (the geographic distance adjusted by the cross-border
nature). Based on this network, we propose a novel metric, namely the spatial
research leadership rank (SpatialLeaderRank), to identify the leading
institutions while considering both the collaboration intensity and the spatial
features. Harnessing a dataset of 323,146 journal publications in
pharmaceutical sciences during 2010-2018, we perform a comprehensive analysis
of the geographical distribution and dynamic patterns of research leadership
flows at the institution level. The results demonstrate that the
SpatialLeaderRank outperforms baseline metrics in predicting the scholarly
impact of institutions. And the result remains robust in the field of
Information Science & Library Science.
