First Effects of the New Silk Road Initiative on Research Collaboration

Abstract

This chapter introduces a large-scale “big data” approach to identify and study possible early effects of the New Silk Road (NSR) initiative on research cooperation patterns between China and other countries. The quantitative data are extracted from publication output in the international research literature, for the years 2010–2018, covered in the Web of Science database. This source contains thousands of research articles co-produced and co-authored by Chinese researchers and their international partners. Following an introductory global overview of collaboration trends, the in-depth part of macro-level analysis relates to research cooperation between China and European countries, where we test six hypotheses about the nature of those collaborative relationships (two of which are confirmed). We observe some minor changes in the smaller countries of Central and Eastern Europe that suggest some emerging NSR effects. However, it is too early to identify structural changes and engage in systematic in-depth assessments of collaborative science.