Exploring the changing geographical pattern of international scientific collaborations through the prism of cities.

György Csomós,Zsófia Viktória Vida,Balázs Lengyel,Lutz Bornmann

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0242468

Abstract

Science is becoming increasingly international in terms of breaking down walls in its pursuit of high impact. Despite geographical location and distance still being major barriers for scientific collaboration, little is known about whether high-impact collaborations are similarly constrained by geography compared to collaborations of average impact. To address this question, we analyze Web of Science (WoS) data on international collaboration between global leader cities in science production. We report an increasing intensity of international city-city collaboration and find that average distance of collaboration of the strongest connections has slightly increased, but distance decay has remained stable over the last three decades. However, high-impact collaborations span large distances by following similar distance decay. This finding suggests that a larger geographical reach of research collaboration should be aimed for to support high-impact science. The creation of the European Research Area (ERA) represents an effective action that has deepened intracontinental research collaborations and the position of the European Union (EU) in global science. Yet, our results provide new evidence that global scientific leaders are not sufficiently collaborative in carrying out their big science projects.

Highlights

The decrease of communication and travel costs since the 1990s has enabled interactions between distant partners
The geographical reach of intensifying international collaboration has widened, while distance decay remained an important factor of collaboration intensity between two cities
Taking each time period, even the latest one into account, the mean distance curves are sloping downwards from the lowest Jaccard index category to the highest one. This finding implies that those cities that are located a further distance from each other, if they are located on different continents, establish relatively less intense scientific cooperation in the given period

Summary

Introduction

The decrease of communication and travel costs since the 1990s has enabled interactions between distant partners. Despite the early visions developed in the geography literature on the decreasing significance of distance [1,2,3,4,5,6], it is repeatedly found that the majority of social interactions are spatially bounded [7,8,9]. Research is no exception: the probability of collaborations decreases as distance grows, as has been found for co-authorship relations [10,11,12], EU-supported research collaboration [13], and inventor collaboration [14]. Exploring the changing geographical pattern of international scientific collaborations of cities dependence of scientific collaboration. Are high-impact collaborations constrained by distance in the same manner as for collaborations of lower impact?

Methods

Results

Conclusion