Impact of scientific, economic, geopolitical, and cultural factors on international research collaboration

Abstract

• The scientific, economic, geopolitical, and cultural factors are found to be shaping the closeness of international research collaboration. • Countries with similarly large scientific and economic sizes tend to collaborate closely with each other. • IGO comemberships largely facilitate the close collaboration in science. • Sharing common official languages and religion backgrounds promotes the close collaboration between countries. Scientific research has been increasingly globalized over the past decades. Each country may choose to collaborate more closely with some countries than others, resulting in non-trivial structural patterns in international collaboration networks. While the structure of the collaboration networks among countries has been widely studied, the origin of such structure still lacks of systematic exploration. Analyzing bibliometric data from six disciplines, this paper reveals four categories of significant drivers for the collaboration closeness between countries, namely science, economy, geopolitics, and culture respectively. Countries with large and equivalent scientific sizes, as well as economic sizes, are more likely to collaborate closely with each other. In particular, comemberships in intergovernmental organizations largely promote close collaboration in science. Cultural links, including the shared language and religion, also facilitate close collaboration between countries. The analytical results shall provide insights on policy-making regarding the design of national research systems and international collaboration strategies.