Diversity and location of knowledge production in small cities in France

•We examine research activity through publications in small and medium cities.•We made a bibliometric study using the Web of Science from 1990 to 2010.•We show that small and medium cities are also creative and produce knowledge.•We show that a plurality of organisms could product knowledge, not only university.

We examine, as a way to measure creativity, the research activities in small and medium-sized French cities. We attempt to evaluate and map the knowledge production that occurs in these cities by searching for articles published in the Web of Science whose authors indicate professional addresses in such cities. We show that publications are written in these small and medium-sized cities and that their number has increased over the last few years. Moreover, the internationalisation of science exists in these cities. We will also demonstrate that the articles published in these cities are created by a heterogeneous group of entities that includes not only universities but also public research organisations, hospitals and firms. Finally, a complementary objective of the article is to present a methodology that allows researchers to ascertain and explore the geographical aspects of the dataset through the use of special-purpose maps and graphical tools.