Abstract
This study examines how inequality in access to research and development (R&D) is represented within the global research landscape and why it remains weakly consolidated as an independent analytical category. Drawing on bibliographic records retrieved from Scopus and the Web of Science Core Collection for 2014 – 2025, the study applies author – keyword co – occurrence analysis to examine the thematic structure of research related to regional innovation, spatial inequality, economic geography, and research capacity. The integrated dataset contains 7,592 records. Using a minimum occurrence threshold of five, 106 author keywords were retained and organized into nine thematic clusters. The resulting network is dominated by established themes such as regional development, peripheral regions, core – periphery relations, regional innovation, and spatial inequality, while terminology explicitly referring to R&D access appears comparatively weak and fragmented. The findings therefore provide bibliometric evidence of limited thematic consolidation around R&D access rather than establishing it as an empirically validated dimension of inequality. Building on this pattern, the study proposes R&D access as a distinct analytical dimension of regional inequality and outlines three conceptual forms – material, cognitive, and institutional access-for future empirical investigation.