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.

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International Research Collaboration among Academics in China and South Korea

International Journal of Chinese Education ◽

10.1163/22125868-12340005 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 1 (2) ◽

pp. 235-254 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Jisun Jung

Keyword(s):

South Korea ◽

International Research ◽

Research Collaboration ◽

Citation Index ◽

Academic Discipline ◽

International Research Collaboration ◽

Individual Level ◽

Publication Patterns ◽

Collaboration Patterns ◽

Share Of Articles

Abstract This study examines international research collaboration among Chinese and Korean academics. International research collaboration among academics, which is generally measured by co-authored publications, is an important part of the internationalization of higher education, not only at an individual level but also at institutional and national levels. This study uses the online Science Citation Index database from Web of Knowledge for the analysis and demonstrates descriptive results of international co-authored publication patterns. International research collaboration is defined as the share of articles published together with at least one author from another country anywhere in the world. The study examines how international research collaboration patterns have changed from 1975 to 2010 in China and South Korea. In particular, it focuses on the growth of international research collaboration, the main collaborative countries among Chinese and Korean academics, and the differences in international research collaboration patterns by academic discipline.

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Is academia becoming more localised? The growth of regional knowledge networks within international research collaboration

Applied Network Science ◽

10.1007/s41109-021-00371-w ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

Author(s):

John Fitzgerald ◽

Sanna Ojanperä ◽

Neave O’Clery

Keyword(s):

Economic Development ◽

International Collaboration ◽

International Research ◽

Research Collaboration ◽

Learning By Doing ◽

Knowledge Networks ◽

Collaboration Network ◽

International Research Collaboration ◽

The Past ◽

Capability Building

AbstractIt is well-established that the process of learning and capability building is core to economic development and structural transformation. Since knowledge is ‘sticky’, a key component of this process is learning-by-doing, which can be achieved via a variety of mechanisms including international research collaboration. Uncovering significant inter-country research ties using Scopus co-authorship data, we show that within-region collaboration has increased over the past five decades relative to international collaboration. Further supporting this insight, we find that while communities present in the global collaboration network before 2000 were often based on historical geopolitical or colonial lines, in more recent years they increasingly align with a simple partition of countries by regions. These findings are unexpected in light of a presumed continual increase in globalisation, and have significant implications for the design of programmes aimed at promoting international research collaboration and knowledge diffusion.

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