Chinese Universities’ Cross-Border Research Collaboration in the Social Sciences and Its Impact

Yang Liu,Ziniu Qian,Jinyuan Ma,Xiao Lin,Huanyu Song

doi:10.3390/su131810378

Yang Liu, Ziniu Qian + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su131810378

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Abstract

This paper examined the coauthorship patterns in Chinese researchers’ cross-border research collaboration in the social sciences based on articles and reviews indexed in the Scopus database (2010–2019). We explored the evolution of coauthorship patterns by proportion of collaboration, year, research field, country/region, and research institution; additionally, the quality/impact of the coauthored publications was examined using four levels of paper quality (Q1–4), citations per paper, and FWCI. We found that collaboration between Chinese and international scholars is very common, and more than 40% of all papers published by Chinese scholars from 2010 to 2019 involved cross-border collaboration. The growth in collaboration was very steady over the past 10 years, increasing by an average of 20% per year. United States scholars are the most common research collaboration partners for Chinese scholars in the social sciences, followed by those in Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. The field of psychology seeks the most collaboration, followed by economics and finance, business and management, and social issues. The percentage of Q1 papers increased from 36% in 2010 to 66% in 2019. Thus, in the past 10 years, Chinese scholars’ cross-border collaboration has grown extensively in terms of both quantity and impact.

Highlights

In the era of economic globalization, the global flow of research resources has increased along with the development of information and communication technology [1,2].As a result, international research collaboration in the form of coauthored articles has become increasingly prevalent [2,3,4], and the number of coauthored articles has grown exponentially [5,6,7]
There have been some insightful studies probing the patterns and dynamics of China’s social science research via bibliometric analyses [18,19,20,21,22,23], we identified an evident research gap surrounding Chinese scholars’ performance in international research collaboration in the general social sciences and the impact of this collaboration on citations
According to the data from Scopus, from 2010 to 2019, the total number of publications published by Chinese scholars in the social sciences was 145,933; of these, 60,377 were cross-border collaborative publications

Summary

Introduction

International research collaboration in the form of coauthored articles has become increasingly prevalent [2,3,4], and the number of coauthored articles has grown exponentially [5,6,7]. Scientists from all over the world cowrite papers with their foreign peers to improve the efficiency and impact of scientific research [2]. A growing number of empirical studies have shown that the growing quantity and impact of China’s scientific knowledge creation can be attributed to international research collaboration [1,6,8,9,10,11,12]. There is a thread of collaborative research with the aim of conducting comparative studies by using the same frameworks or tools [13]

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