A group of researchers from the Knowledge Media Institute (The Open University) has been using SciGraph Linked Open Data to investigate geographical trends in conference proceedings metadata covering the 1996-2017 period. Here's an except from the abstract:

Results emerged from our micro and macro analysis show that the distributions among countries of institutions and papers follow a power law, and thus very few countries keep producing most of the papers accepted by high-tier conferences. In addition, we found that the annual and overall turnover rate of the top 5, 10 and 25 countries is extremely low, suggesting a very static landscape in which new entries struggle to emerge. Finally, we highlight the presence of an increasing gap between the number of institutions initiating and overseeing research endeavours (i.e. first and last authors’ affiliations) and the total number of institutions participating in research.

The article ("Geographical trends in research: a preliminary analysis on authors’ affiliations") has won the best paper award at the recent SAVE-SD 2018 workshop, an event in its fourth edition with focus on the semantics and analytics of scholarly data. The workshop was part of the annual World Wide Web conference.

One of the core goals of SciGraph is to contribute to make science more open by allowing researchers to independently explore and study our bibliographic metadata. So this is a great success story for us.

We will continue to support this group and others who intend to carry out similar projects, so stay tuned for more!