Evolution of scientific collaboration based on academic ages

Abstract

Scientific collaboration has been a hot topic and investigated a lot over the decades. In this paper, we collect and set up a comprehensive scientific dataset that comprises more than 150 million papers with multiple attribute information from over 170 countries and regions across different disciplines and fields. Although there have been various studies on scientific collaboration based on authors’ age, this paper is dedicated to unfolding the data in a time dimension and discovering a new perspective on the evolution of collaboration between authors and countries. An intensive study is provided to give a depth and close analysis of the collaboration between authors and international scientific collaboration from the perspective of authors’ academic age. The two-author collaborative mode based on the academic age is defined to investigate the collaborative pattern. We find that as time goes by, although the Beginning scholars continue to rise sharply, the proportion of collaboration between Beginning scholars decreases gradually, and the diversity of the collaborative pattern becomes more apparent. We further extend the two-author mode into international scientific collaboration by considering the national attributes of authors’ affiliation. Internal collaboration does not account for a large proportion of the overall scientific collaboration. Different countries exhibit different collaborative patterns expanded over time, but the proportion of collaboration between Beginning scholars plays a key factor to make a distinction between collaborative patterns of countries. Moreover, based on the similarities and discrepancies of the collaborative mode of countries and regions, we classify them into two clusters. The clustering results provide a good distinction between countries and regions in terms of the volume of national publications. The collaborations between Beginning scholars occupy more than half of the overall scientific collaboration for the countries with less number of papers. In contrast, the countries with a larger number of papers have a more diversified and relatively balanced collaborative mode.