Multilevel Analysis of International Scientific Collaboration Network in the Influenza Virus Vaccine Field: 2006–2013

Yun Liu,Yijie Cheng,Xuanting Ye,Zhe Yan

doi:10.3390/su10041232

Abstract

Influenza virus vaccine plays an important role in preventing influenza and protecting people’s health. The international collaboration in influenza virus vaccine field is related to the sustainability of healthcare. To understand the elaborate characteristics of multiform international collaboration in the influenza virus vaccine field, this paper constructs a multilayered analytical framework (at the country, city and institution levels) of international scientific collaboration to examine the regional distribution, dynamic changes and common themes of collaboration. A total of 1878 international collaboration papers of the influenza virus vaccine field published from 2006 to 2013 were collected from the Web of Science database. Based on this dataset, the paper utilizes bibliometrics and social network analysis approaches to explore international publication trends and collaboration performance in the influenza virus vaccine field. Results show that: (1) the three kinds of collaboration networks (country, city and institution levels) all present dynamic structures, strong core-periphery characteristics, and their degree centrality distributions follows segmented Zifp-Pareto distribution; and (2) although it is known that there exist corresponding relationships among countries, cities and institutions in the geographical position, most of their associated categories, network locations and changing trends are all non-conformal. These findings suggest that multilayered analysis enables a more comprehensive understanding of international scientific collaboration in the influenza virus vaccine field. In general, detailed conclusions can help different levels of governments to draw policy implications for promoting further international collaboration research to enhance the ability on preventing the disease.

Highlights

Influenza viruses typically cause outbreak son a local scale and spread to a worldwide scope including Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, with potentially severe consequences for human health and national economies [1,2]
Freeman (1978, 1979), in his seminal paper on social network analysis, explained that the selection of three types of indices depends on the research question: if you are mainly concerned about exchange activities, degree centrality can be used as the basis of measurement; if the research is focused on the control of communication, you can choose betweenness centrality; if the independence or effectiveness of information transfer is to be analyzed, closeness centrality can be adopted [36,37]
We longitudinally examined the regional distribution, dynamic changes, and common themes of collaborations of the influenza virus vaccine (IVV) field, based on scientific publications from 2006 to 2013 collected from the Web of Science (WoS) database

Summary

Introduction

Influenza viruses typically cause outbreak son a local scale and spread to a worldwide scope including Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, with potentially severe consequences for human health and national economies [1,2]. In the recent report of the WHO, it claimed that another influenza pandemic is inevitable In this interconnected world, the onset of the global flu outbreak is only a matter of time and no conditions to be fulfilled—it will have far-reaching consequences. Preventing the influenza pandemic via international scientific collaboration in the IVV field is related to healthcare which is the third of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all ages. It can strengthen the sustainability of healthcare from following aspects: on one hand, international scientific collaboration in the IVV field can promote the common development and coordinated development of different countries’ related healthcare system to cope with the possible crisis; on the other hand, through in-depth international collaboration, the development efficiency and technological level of vaccines can be improved, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of relevant healthcare measures and achieving efficient development

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