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Global scientific research output has experienced continuous and rapid growth during the last 20 years. The spatial and temporal variations of the international papers at the national and regional scales were analyzed by combining the remotely sensed nighttime light data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's Operational Linescan System. The findings indicate that the publication of international-circulation scientific papers in most of the countries examined have experienced a trend of exponential increase which can be positively correlated with nighttime light in those counties or regions. Furthermore, the developing countries have higher correlation coefficients than the developed countries. Thus, literal nighttime light data can potentially be used in future to better predict the number of publications of the research of figurative `luminaries' residing in developing countries.

The subject intersection becomes one of the hot research topics recently. It is a new direction to integrate the GIS technologies with Bibliometrics. The literatures concerned with geosciences normally involve some spatial related information. In this paper, the spatial information of the study area and sampling or observing points was extracted. Then these data were analyzed and presented by using the GIS technologies. The results indicate that there are big variations of the spatial distribution. For the whole Qinghai-Tibet plateau, the degree of interest increase as follow: southwest, northwest, southeast, and northeast. For the regions, Qilian Mountains, Qiangtang plateau, Qinghai-Tibet Road and Qinghai-Tibet Railway, Qinghai Lake, and Sichuan-Tibet Road are the hotspot regions. There are differences of the distribution characteristics in the different segments along the latitudinal direction and longitudinal direction. There is transfer tendency from middle Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to northern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Most of sampling and observing points are close to the traffic lines. The point numbers decrease quickly along with the increasing distance to the traffic lines.

The subject intersection becomes a hot research topic recently. This paper tried to couple the Bibliometrics and Geographical Information System (GIS) technologies for studying on the spatial information mining and visualization from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau's literature. All the literatures about Qinghai-Tibet Plateau research were indexed in the ISI Web of Knowledge. The statistical tables about the authors were extracted from the papers by using the method of bibliometrics. The spatial information of the author's countries was linked with the GIS database. The spatial distribution was presented by the format of maps based on the GIS technologies. Comparing with the regular presentation forms of the bibliometrical analysis, the spatial distribution maps can afford more abundant and intuitive senses for the users.