The line of sight through the Galactic Plane between longitudes l = 37.83 \degr and l = 42.50 \degr allows for the separation of Galactic Ring Survey molecular clouds into those that fall within the spiral arms and those located in the inter-arm regions .
By matching these clouds in both position and velocity with dense clumps detected in the mm continuum by the Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey , we are able to look for changes in the clump formation efficiency ( CFE ) , the ratio of clump-to-cloud mass , with Galactic environment .
We find no evidence of any difference in the CFE between the inter-arm and spiral-arm regions along this line of sight .
This is further evidence that , outside the Galactic Centre region , the large-scale structures of the Galaxy play little part in changing the dense , potentially star-forming structures within molecular clouds .