The authors of this article examine, as a way to measure creativity, the research activities in small and medium-sized French cities. They try to evaluate and map the knowledge activity and production in such cities by searching articles published or cited in the Web of Science, whose authors indicate professionnal adresses in such cities. The article shows that the number of publications written in small and medium-sized cities has increased over the last few years. Finally, a complementary objective of this article is to present a methodology that allows researchers to ascertain and explore geographical aspects of the dataset of WOS through the use of special-purpose maps and graphical tools