ArticlePloS one2021
Association between population distribution and urban GDP scaling.
Article in PloS one, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Recent advances in urban system science: Models and data.PloS one · 2022Pooled it
- Large cities lose their growth advantage as countries urbanize.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Comprehensive indicators and fine granularity refine density scaling laws in rural-urban systems.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Evolving spatiotemporal patterns and urban scaling of deaths from external causes.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Global consistency of urban scaling evidenced by remote sensing.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Increasing rat numbers in cities are linked to climate warming, urbanization, and human population.Science advances · 2025Article
- Impact of inter-city interactions on disease scaling.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Indication of long-range correlations governing city size.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Drivers of urban biodiversity in Mexico and joint risks from future urban expansion, climate change, and urban heat island effect.PloS one · 2024Article
- Non-trivial relationship between scaling behavior and the spatial organization of GDP in Indonesian cities.PloS one · 2022Article
- The agglomeration and dispersion dichotomy of human settlements on Earth.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Commuting network effect on urban wealth scaling.Scientific reports · 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
Urban scaling and Zipf's law are two fundamental paradigms for the science of cities. These laws have mostly been investigated independently and are often perceived as disassociated matters. Here we present a large scale investigation about the connection between these two laws using population and GDP data from almost five thousand consistently-defined cities in 96 countries. We empirically demonstrate that both laws are tied to each other and derive an expression relating the urban scaling and Zipf exponents. This expression captures the average tendency of the empirical relation between both exponents, and simulations yield very similar results to the real data after accounting for random variations. We find that while the vast majority of countries exhibit increasing returns to scale of urban GDP, this effect is less pronounced in countries with fewer small cities and more metropolises (small Zipf exponent) than in countries with a more uneven number of small and large cities (large Zipf exponent). Our research puts forward the idea that urban scaling does not solely emerge from intra-city processes, as population distribution and scaling of urban GDP are correlated to each other.
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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.