Patterns Of International Scientific Collaboration Research Articles

Exploring the changing geographical pattern of international scientific collaborations through the prism of cities.

Science is becoming increasingly international in terms of breaking down walls in its pursuit of high impact. Despite geographical location and distance still being major barriers for scientific collaboration, little is known about whether high-impact collaborations are similarly constrained by geography compared to collaborations of average impact. To address this question, we analyze Web of Science (WoS) data on international collaboration between global leader cities in science production. We report an increasing intensity of international city-city collaboration and find that average distance of collaboration of the strongest connections has slightly increased, but distance decay has remained stable over the last three decades. However, high-impact collaborations span large distances by following similar distance decay. This finding suggests that a larger geographical reach of research collaboration should be aimed for to support high-impact science. The creation of the European Research Area (ERA) represents an effective action that has deepened intracontinental research collaborations and the position of the European Union (EU) in global science. Yet, our results provide new evidence that global scientific leaders are not sufficiently collaborative in carrying out their big science projects.

Allometric models to measure and analyze the evolution of international research collaboration

A fundamental problem in the field of the social studies of science is how to measure the patterns of international scientific collaboration to analyse the structure and evolution of scientific fields. This study here confronts the problem by developing an allometric model of morphological changes in order to measure and analyse the relative growth of international research collaboration in comparison with domestic collaboration only for fields of science. Statistical analysis, based on data of internationally co-authored papers from National Science Foundation (1997---2012 period), shows an acceleration (a disproportionate relative growth) of collaboration patterns in medical sciences, social sciences, geosciences, agricultural sciences, and psychology (predominantly applied fields). By contrast, some predominantly basic fields, including physics and mathematics, have lower levels of relative growth in international scientific collaboration. These characteristics of patterns of international research collaboration seem to be vital contributing factors for the evolution of the social dynamics and social construction of science. The main aim of this article is therefore to clarify the on-going evolution of scientific fields that might be driven by the plexus (interwoven combination of parts in a system) of research disciplines, which generates emerging research fields with high growth rates of international scientific collaboration.

Evolution and convergence of the patterns of international scientific collaboration

International research collaboration plays an important role in the social construction and evolution of science. Studies of science increasingly analyze international collaboration across multiple organizations for its impetus in improving research quality, advancing efficiency of the scientific production, and fostering breakthroughs in a shorter time. However, long-run patterns of international research collaboration across scientific fields and their structural changes over time are hardly known. Here we show the convergence of international scientific collaboration across research fields over time. Our study uses a dataset by the National Science Foundation and computes the fraction of papers that have international institutional coauthorships for various fields of science. We compare our results with pioneering studies carried out in the 1970s and 1990s by applying a standardization method that transforms all fractions of internationally coauthored papers into a comparable framework. We find, over 1973-2012, that the evolution of collaboration patterns across scientific disciplines seems to generate a convergence between applied and basic sciences. We also show that the general architecture of international scientific collaboration, based on the ranking of fractions of international coauthorships for different scientific fields per year, has tended to be unchanged over time, at least until now. Overall, this study shows, to our knowledge for the first time, the evolution of the patterns of international scientific collaboration starting from initial results described by literature in the 1970s and 1990s. We find a convergence of these long-run collaboration patterns between the applied and basic sciences. This convergence might be one of contributing factors that supports the evolution of modern scientific fields.

Proximity and Scientific Collaboration: Evidence from the Global Wine Industry

AbstractInternational collaboration among researchers is a far from linear and straightforward process. Scientometric studies provide a good way of understanding why and how international research collaboration occurs and what are its costs and benefits. Our study investigates patterns of international scientific collaboration in a specific field: wine related research. We test a gravity model that accounts for geographical, cultural, commercial, technological, structural and institutional differences among a group of old world (OW) and new world (NW) producers and consumers. Our findings confirm the problems imposed by geographical and technological distance on international research collaboration. Furthermore, they show that similarity in trade patterns has a positive impact on international scientific collaboration. We also find that international research collaboration is more likely among peers; in other words, among wine producing countries that belong to the same group, for example, OW producers or newcomers to the wine industry,

International Scientific Collaboration in HIV and HPV: A Network Analysis

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.

The major role of toxicology societies in global collaborations – a call to action

The major role of toxicology societies in global collaborations – a call to action

Can the centre–periphery model explain patterns of international scientific collaboration among threshold and industrialised countries? The case of South Africa and Germany

As scientific collaboration is a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly important, studies on scientific collaboration are numerous. Despite the proliferation of studies on various dimensions of collaboration, there is still a dearth of analyses on the effects, motives and modes of collaboration in the context of developing countries. Adopting Wallerstein’s world-system theory, this paper makes use of bibliometric data in an attempt to understand the pattern of collaboration that emerges between South Africa and Germany. The key argument is that we can expect the collaborative relationship between South Africa and Germany to be one that is shaped by a centre–periphery pattern. The analyses show that a theory of scientific collaboration building on the notion of marginality and centre–periphery can explain many facets of South African–German collaboration, where South Africa is a semi-peripheral region, a centre for the periphery, and a periphery for the centre.