The Global Inter-City Collaboration Network of Smart City Research: A Spatial Scientometrics Analysis (2010–2022)

Background Global collaborations play an increasing role in knowledge production, yet geographical proximity remains an important facilitator. The social sciences and sciences exhibit diverse output, citation, and collaboration patterns. This spatial scientometric study investigates the interdisciplinary Smart City (SC) field to determine whether field-specific knowledge regimes shape distinct global collaboration patterns. Methods Using metadata from 21,930 Web of Science publications, we employed co-word analysis and Louvain community detection to disaggregate the SC field into technology-oriented and social-oriented meta-domains, focusing on inter-city collaborations across two periods (2010–2017 and 2018–2022). Using affiliations, we identified cities and categorized collaborations across five spatial scales: single-affiliation, intra-city, intranational inter-city, intra-macro-regional, and cross-macro-regional. Analysis variables included number of publications, mean Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI), and highly cited papers (Top 5% and Top 10%). Results While the centres of output were East Asian hubs, the Global North maintains the highest citation impact in SC domain. Collaborations shifted from localized, single-institution research toward global networks. Inter-city collaborations comprised the majority of highly cited papers, with significant cross-regional links. Single-affiliation research remained high in the social-oriented sub-field, though inter-city collaborations gained prominence, and intra-city collaborations stayed vital. In contrast, in the technology-oriented sub-field intra-city research declined, global links strengthened, and high-impact global collaborations were of great importance. Conclusions The two major Smart City sub-fields exhibit typical social science and science collaboration patterns. The technology-oriented sub-field follows a globalized “Big Science” model, while social-oriented research relies more on local context and cognitive proximity. Although geographic distance decay still appears, as intra-city collaboration gives the majority of research output share, there is a tendency of rising importance of global collaboration networks, especially in the case of ‘Top 5%’ highly cited papers.