Is there a tool for visualizing the geographic locations of research? Many e-journals search tools contain much metadata in their database. For example, they have the "location" entry required for some citation formats, which at least shows the location of the journal, but the might also store the original authors' university name.

Is there any tool that can allow researchers to either (a) search a term and see a map of where the articles are coming from or (in some similar form or other) (b) see a world map showing where research in a particular area is geographically concentrated?
this is an active aera of research in Geography of Science. We've been working with sociologists of science and bibliometricians to assemble a geocoded database of scientific publications, based on the Web of Science database.

We've not (yet) produced a publicly available interactive search tool like the one you describe, but it's a possibility. Instead, we have published several papers and an interactive tool to geovisualize the collaborations between co-authors of papers : http://www.coscimo.net/ (in french)

If you're interested in this question, i can provide a bibliography.


A conference paper :
http://sticonference.org/Proceedings/vol1/Grossetti_Geographical_348.pdf
A research paper :
http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/11/20/0042098013506047.full.pdf