Abstract
Research endeavours require the collaborative effort of an increasing number of individuals. International scientific collaborations are particularly important for HIV and HPV co-infection studies, since the burden of disease is rising in developing countries, but most experts and research funds are found in developed countries, where the prevalence of HIV is low. The objective of our study was to investigate patterns of international scientific collaboration in HIV and HPV research using social network analysis. Through a systematic review of the literature, we obtained epidemiological data, as well as data on countries and authors involved in co-infection studies. The collaboration network was analysed in respect to the following: centrality, density, modularity, connected components, distance, clustering and spectral clustering. We observed that for many low- and middle-income countries there were no epidemiological estimates of HPV infection of the cervix among HIV-infected individuals. Most studies found only involved researchers from the same country (64%). Studies derived from international collaborations including high-income countries and either low- or middle-income countries had on average three times larger sample sizes than those including only high-income countries or low-income countries. The high global clustering coefficient (0.9) coupled with a short average distance between researchers (4.34) suggests a “small-world phenomenon.” Researchers from high-income countries seem to have higher degree centrality and tend to cluster together in densely connected communities. We found a large well-connected community, which encompasses 70% of researchers, and 49 other small isolated communities. Our findings suggest that in the field of HIV and HPV, there seems to be both room and incentives for researchers to engage in collaborations between countries of different income-level. Through international collaboration resources available to researchers in high-income countries can be efficiently used to enroll more participants in low- and middle-income countries.
Highlights
As science evolves, important scientific achievements require the collaborative effort of an increasing number of researchers
The studies included in this analysis were highly collaborative in respect to the number of researchers involved but not as much in respect to the number of countries
Among studies involving international collaborations, those including high-income countries and either low- or middleincome countries seemed to have larger patient sample sizes than those including only high-income countries or low-income countries. This may be due to the leveraging of financial resources available to researchers in high-income countries and the larger patient populations in low- and middle-income countries, where the prevalence of HIV and HPV is higher
Summary
Important scientific achievements require the collaborative effort of an increasing number of researchers. The study of patterns of scientific collaboration allows us to gain further understanding of innovation and knowledge production. Scientific collaboration networks have been the subject of growing interest in the past few years [1,2,3,4]. Collaborative scientific publications have a long history. The first collaborative research paper was published in 1665 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society [5]. The most multi-authored scientific paper was published in Physics Letters B in 2010, when 3,222 researchers from 32 different countries contributed to a study of ‘charged-particle multiplicities’ performed in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN [6]
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