Modelling and measuring multilateral co-authorship in international scientific collaboration. Part II. A comparative study on the extent and change of international scientific collaboration links

Abstract

The present study is focused on international collaboration in science, involving more than two countries. The authors developed a promising model to measure and analyse the extent of multilateral co-authorship links in a previous study. The model is based on a series expansion approach which relates a new indicator, the Multilateral Collaboration Index (ρ), to the share of internationally co-authored papers (f). The model was found suitable to classify both the share of international papers, as well as the extent of multilateral links through the deviations from their expectations. A comparative analysis is made of changing collaboration patterns between 1983 and 1993 for 8 selected subfields, as well as all fields combined of the most active 38 countries. As expected an intensification of international scientific collaboration was observed, especially for a number of former COMECON countries. Different types of behaviour for different countries and science subfields emerged.