ArticleScience advances2020
The universal pathway to innovative urban economies.
Article in Science advances, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Recent advances in urban system science: Models and data.PloS one · 2022Pooled it
- Human mobility in the metaverse mirrors patterns in the physical world.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Scaling laws for function diversity and specialization across socioeconomic and biological complex systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Skill dependencies uncover nested human capital.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Article
- Universal abundance fluctuations across microbial communities, tropical forests, and urban populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The dynamic resilience of urban labour networks.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Urban economic fitness and complexity from patent data.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Cities can benefit from complex supply chains.npj urban sustainability · 2023Article
- Article
- The latent structure of global scientific development.Nature human behaviour · 2022Article
- Commuting network effect on urban wealth scaling.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Occupational mobility and automation: a data-driven network model.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Article
- Scaling behavior of public procurement activity.PloS one · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Is there a universal economic pathway individual cities recapitulate over and over? This evolutionary structure-if any-would inform a reference model for fairer assessment, better maintenance, and improved forecasting of urban development. Using employment data including more than 100 million U.S. workers in all industries between 1998 and 2013, we empirically show that individual cities indeed recapitulate a common pathway where a transition to innovative economies is observed at the population of 1.2 million. This critical population is analytically derived by expressing the urban industrial structure as a function of scaling relations such that cities are divided into two economic categories: small city economies with sublinear industries and large city economies with superlinear industries. Last, we define a recapitulation score as an agreement between the longitudinal and the cross-sectional scaling exponents and find that nontradeable industries tend to adhere to the universal pathway more than the tradeable.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.