Globalization and de-globalization in nanotechnology research: the role of China

The share of nanotechnology publications involving authors from more than one country more than doubled in the 1990s, but then fell again until 2004, before recovering somewhat during the latter years of the decade. Meanwhile, the share of nanotechnology papers involving at least one Chinese author increased substantially over the last two decades. Papers involving Chinese authors are far less likely to be internationally co-authored than papers involving authors from other countries. Nonetheless, this appears to be changing as Chinese nanotechnology research becomes more advanced. An arithmetic decomposition confirms that China??s growing share of such research accounts, in large part, for the observed stagnation of international collaboration. Thus two aspects of the globalization of science can work in opposing directions: diffusion to initially less scientifically advanced countries can depress international collaboration rates, while at the same time scientific advances in such countries can reverse this trend. We find that the growth of China??s scientific community explains some, but not all of the dynamics of China??s international collaboration rate. We therefore provide an institutional account of these dynamics, drawing on Stichweh??s [Social Science information 35(2):327?C340, 1996] original paper on international scientific collaboration, which, in examining the interrelated development of national and international scientific networks, predicts a transitional phase during which science becomes a more national enterprise, followed by a phase marked by accelerating international collaboration. Validating the application of this approach, we show that Stichweh??s predictions, based on European scientific communities in the 18th and 19th centuries, seem to apply to the Chinese scientific community in the 21st century.     

China’s emerging centrality in the contemporary international scientific collaboration network

In this paper we analyze the evolution of China’s growing importance in international scientific collaboration over the past 15 years. Using co-authored publications indexed in Clarivate Analytics’s Web of Science Core Collection we develop novel weighted and unweighted centrality measures to quantify China’s emerging role in the global scientific research network. We analyze the networks formed by international co-authorship in three 5-year periods: 2001–2005, 2006–2010, and 2011–2015. This analysis highlights China’s sharp increase in prominence in international scientific collaborations. The analysis of China’s co-authored, highly cited papers also illustrates China’s rising importance in scientific research and collaboration from a different perspective. The impact of multilaterally co-authored papers to the centrality measure is also analyzed both theoretically and empirically. The results show that multilateral collaboration is also a key factor that influences the centrality of a country beyond simply the scale of international co-authorship. We further contextualize our work in a discussion of international scientific collaboration as both a key driver of China’s economy and its emerging perception as a first-world innovator and intellectual power. Finally, we suggest directions for further research including more granular analysis by academic discipline and an alternative investigation based on the fractional counting method.     

Exploratory search of academic publication and citation data using interactive tag cloud visualizations

The number of authors from different countries have recently increased in ecology papers, but the international collaboration among ecologists does not occur in an idiosyncratic way. In this paper, we quantified the level of international collaboration in ecology papers and the influence of geographic distance and socioeconomic factors on collaboration between countries. We obtained all papers from Thomson-ISI, classified as subject ecology between years 2000 and 2014 (total of 62,667 papers with international collaboration in 179 countries). The gravity model (binomial negative model) indicated that the level of international collaboration is moderate spatially structured, decreasing as the geographical distance among countries increase. Moreover, the geographic distance and socioeconomic factors explained 10% of the scientific collaboration among countries (Pseudo R ² = 0.10). Highly collaborative countries were found in similar trade blocs, with similar Human Development Index, similar scientific structure (i.e., number of citation per documents) and tended to be geographically close. Thus, international collaboration will continue increasing, and young ecologists will experience international collaboration, even with distant countries (both geographical and socioeconomic).     

International collaboration in scientific publishing: the case of West Africa (2001–2010)

Bibliographic data of publications indexed in Web of Science with at least one (co-)author affiliated to any of the 15 West African countries and published from 2001 to 2010 included are downloaded. Analyses focused one collaboration indicators especially intra regional collaboration, intra African collaboration and collaboration with the world. Results showed that the rate of papers with only one author is diminishing whereas the rate of papers with six and more authors is increasing. Nigeria is responsible for more than half the region’s total scientific output. The main African partner countries are South Africa (in the Southern Africa, Cameroon (in the Central Africa), Kenya and Tanzania (in the Eastern Africa). The main non African partner countries are France, USA and United Kingdom, which on their own contributed to over 63 % of the papers with a non West African address. Individual countries have higher international collaboration rate, except Nigeria. West African countries cooperated less with each other and less with African and developing countries than they did with developed ones. The study suggests national authorities to express in actions their commitment to allot at least 1 % of their GDP to science and technology funding. It also suggests regional integration institutions to encourage and fund research activities that involve several institutions from different West African countries in order to increase intra regional scientific cooperation.     

International scientific and technological collaboration of China from 2004 to 2008: a perspective from paper and patent analysis

Since China adopted Open-Up and Reformed Policy for global collaboration, China’s science and technology have experienced an astounding growth. Papers and patents encompass valuable scientific and technological (S&T) information and collaborative efforts. This article studies China’s international S&T collaboration from the perspective of paper and patent analysis. The results show that China’s total papers and patents have continuously increased from 2004 to 2008, the papers and patents resulting from China’s international collaboration also present a steady growth. However, there is a decline in the share of international collaboration papers and patents with a certain range due to the rapid independent R&D. China’s international scientific collaboration (ISC) is broadly distributed over many countries, the USA being the most important ISC partners. China’s international technological collaboration (ITC) is mainly carried out with USA and Taiwan, and Taiwan has been the most significant ITC partner of when taking countries’ patent output into account. Besides, ISC shows a continuous raise of Chinese papers’ citation. Even the countries with a small amount of papers and ISC with China, exert a positive influence on the impact of citation of Chinese papers as well. However, ITC does not always play an active role in the improvement of citation impact of Chinese patents.     

International collaboration of three ‘giants’ with the G7 countries in emerging nanobiopharmaceuticals

Nanobiopharmaceuticals is a hopeful research domain from recent scientific advances with massive marketable potential. Although some researchers have studied international collaboration from some aspects, few articles are as comprehensive as this article to consider international cooperation from so many different aspects. We lay more emphasis on international collaboration in the field of nanobiopharmaceuticals involving China. Incremental citation impact values show that in order to move forward and improve the overall competitiveness in the field, China requires to carry out more international collaboration in the field, especially with USA, Germany, and England. Startlingly, multinational collaboration does not sway Chinese citation impact as much as we anticipate in the field. China has reached the first rank in the world in terms of publication amount per year in the field in 2009. Few papers about international collaboration compare small world phenomenon. We use small world quotient to find that it is important for Chinese international co-authors to strengthen to cultivate a cooperation networks in which a node’s partners are also buddies to each other.     

Product and process innovation in manufacturing firms: a 30-year bibliometric analysis

In recent decades, internationalization of research activities has increased, as demonstrated by the phenomena of international scientific collaboration and international mobility of researchers. This paper investigates whether the international scientific collaboration is explained by researchers’ motivation as well as their international migration. Using metadata from papers published in Nature and Science from 1989 to 2009, count data estimation was conducted. The results illustrate those researchers’ international migration and motivation, shown by both synergy and difference effects between countries, explain international collaboration. This implies that international co-authorship in recent decades has been based on researchers’ motivation as well as their networking. The positive result for synergy effects also means that pairs of countries with rich research environments tended to have more international collaboration, which may lead to the convergence of qualified research output in advanced scientific countries. Our findings also support the conclusion that researchers move to countries with better research environments, but networks created through international collaboration are not a factor in international migration. The relationship between international mobility and collaboration is confirmed as going in one direction, from mobility to collaboration.     

An exploratory study on collaboration profiles of Chinese publications in Molecular Biology

Summary As science has become much complex and sophisticated, greater attention is paid to scientific collaboration within recent bibliometric studies. A total of 6538 publications in Molecular Biology from China during 1999-2003, as indicated by data collected from database of the Science Citation Index Expanded - Web Edition, have been analyzed. A large proportion of publications have been authored by more than 3 scientists. The composition of publications grouped by collaboration patterns are: 1.58% non-collaborative papers, 42.43% local papers, 34.37% domestic papers and 21.62% international papers on average during the studied period. The countries with which China has collaborative links and their frequencies are all itemized to indicate the intensity of international collaboration in the field of Molecular Biology. Finally, the differences between the impact of wholly indigenous papers and internationally collaborative papers have been compared. The results indicate that foreign collaboration does contribute a lot to the improvement of the mainstream connectivity and international visibility.     

International research collaborations of ASEAN Nations in economics, 1979–2010

This study examines the research performance and international research collaborations (IRC) of ASEAN nations in the area of economics. Over the last 3 decades international collaborated papers have increased in the region, while locally-co-authored papers have declined. Singapore towered among ASEAN nations in research efficiency based on geographical area, population and GDP. Vietnam performed relatively better in research efficiency than research productivity (number of papers produced), while Indonesia performed poorly. Overall, internationally co-authored papers were cited twice as often as locally authored papers except that both The Philippines and Indonesia exhibited almost no difference in how their local and internationally co-authored papers were cited. The study also examined IRC from the perspective of social networks. Centrality had a strong correlation with research performance; however, vertex tie-strength (a result of repeat collaboration) showed maximum correlation with research performance. While Malaysia emerged as the nation with the highest betweenness centrality or ‘bridging’ power, the US emerged as the most favoured international partner of ASEAN nations. However, collaboration between ASEAN countries accounted for just 4 % of all international collaborations. Increased academic mobility and more joint scientific works are suggestions to consider to boost educational co-operation among the ASEAN nations.     

Network structure, distribution and the growth of Chinese international research collaboration

The paper studied 211,946 articles indexed in Thomson Reuters’s Web of Science from January 1st 2002 to December 31st 2011, in order to describe the growth and distribution of Chinese international research collaboration (IRC), from the perspective of amount, authors, countries, discipline fields and journals. By applying bibliometric and social network methods, this study provided the collaboration network of countries and fields. The main results were as follow: the number of article increased faster comparing with the stable growth in average annual of IRC degree; the articles collaborated with SAC are 80 % more than all IRC’s; as to the fields, collaboration in Social science is at disadvantage, while the largest field is physics and the fastest field is molecular biology and genetics; mathematics, physics, multidisciplinary and space science had more in fluencies than others in corresponding respective journals; as to the network, USA, as the largest and most important partner, had 30 % IRC articles, and collaborated with China in all 22 ESI fields.     

Scientific production and citation impact: a bibliometric analysis in acupuncture over three decades

Acupuncture, the most important nonpharmacological therapy in traditional Chinese medicine, has attracted significant attention since its introduction to the Western world. This study employs bibliometric analysis to examine the profile of publication activity related to it. The data are retrieved from the database of Science Citation Index Expanded during 1980–2009, and 7,592 papers are identified for analysis. This study finds that almost 20 % of papers are published in CAM journals, and the average cited times per acupuncture paper is 8.69. While the most cited article has been cited 2,109 times, however, 38.15 % of total publications have never been cited. Europe has the largest amount of authored papers with high h-index values; the USA has the largest number of publications on and citations of acupuncture based on country distribution, and this has continued as a significant rising trend. The proportion of collaborative papers shows this upward trend on the worldwide scale while the percentage shares of national collaborations are the highest. The USA produces the most international collaborative documents, although South Korea occupies the highest percentage figure for international collaborative papers. International collaborative papers are the most frequently cited. The average number of authors per paper is 3.69 in the top eight countries/regions. Papers contributed by South Korea are authored by the most people. International collaboration papers are authored by more people, except in Taiwan. South Korea’s Kyung Hee University is ranked first in terms of number of papers while Harvard University in the USA accounts for the largest proportion of citations. The University of Exeter, Harvard University and Karolinska Institute have the highest h-index values.     

Growing trend of China’s contribution to tissue engineering

This study examines China’s performance on tissue engineering using scientometrics measures such as China’s global publication share, rank, growth rate and citation impact, its publications in various sub-fields, top journals in terms of national share based on last 5 years (2008–2012) publications data obtained from ISI Science citation index expanded database. We have also determined Chinese share with international collaborative papers at the national level, as well as h-core papers and high-cited papers, etc.     

Who are the international research collaboration partners for China? A novel data perspective based on NSFC grants

International research collaboration is vital to the success of scientific development of China, and the identification of collaboration partners is the basic unit of collaboration. While many researchers have investigated international research collaboration using publication data, grant data have rarely been used. This paper explores the international research collaboration partners of China from a new data perspective, based on grant data. Using data from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) joint grants between China and 75 countries from 2006 to 2016, this study examines the collaboration partners in three aspects: overall collaboration activity, relative research effort, and collaboration groups of countries. Some interesting results are obtained as follows. Among 75 partners, the top 15 account for 95.42% of the total grants, but they are quite uneven in collaborating grant numbers and shares. The USA ranks far ahead of the others with a share of 53.27%, but China maintained a steady, approximately average collaborative effort with it from 2006 to 2016. China shows a growing preference for collaborating with Australia, the Netherlands, and Spain, while the preferences for Japan, Germany, and Sweden are the opposite. The collaborative number of grants among five collaboration groups varies greatly because of different features of constituents’ countries. The G7 and Asia–Pacific both own more than 75% of all the grants, while the BRICS and “The Belt and Road” are relatively weak in research collaboration, but China has maintained a rising trend of collaboration with them over the past 11 years.     

The unbalanced performance and regional differences in scientific and technological collaboration in the field of solar cells

This study attempts to explore collaborations in the field of solar cell science and technology, focusing on the productivity and citations of papers and patents at the global and country levels. This study finds that most papers and patents are collaborative efforts, however, the rate of collaboration is higher for papers. In particular, international collaboration is not common in patents. In terms of performance, international collaborations have shown the best performance overall if looking at trends that cover the 30 years from 1980 to 2009, but the performance of single-authored papers has been better in the more recent ten-year period, 2000–2009. At the country level, we found that most countries have higher rates of international collaboration with greater numbers in papers and patents. Asian countries such as Japan, Taiwan and India have significant citation performance with high ratios for domestic collaboration; the rates are even greater than the average ratio for international collaboration.     

Relationship between international collaboration papers and their citations from an economic perspective

This paper analyzes the relationship among international collaboration, number of papers and number of citations from an economic perspective. It analyzes the number of international collaboration papers and their citations according to different international economic collaboration types, the number of countries at different economic levels, and the economic situations of first or corresponding authors. This study analyzes international collaboration papers listed in Web of Science from 2011 to 2015, published in the field of Public, Environmental and Occupational Health. According to different international collaboration types, results show that the subset of international collaboration with the same economic level accounts for the highest percentage, especially the type of H&H, and there are significant differences in average citations among different collaboration types, the type of H&M&L has the highest value (11.21?±?15.72). According to the number of countries at different economic levels, results show that papers published by ≥?3 countries account for the highest percentage most of the time in different collaboration types. In general, there are positive correlations between the number of countries and citations, but there are no significant differences according to the number of low income countries in different types except H&M&L. According to economic situations of first or corresponding authors, results show that papers initiated by high income countries always account for the highest percentage over past 5 years, and there are positive correlations between the economic situations of first or corresponding authors and citations in different types except H&M. (H: high income countries, M: middle income countries, L: low income countries).     

The power law relationship between citation impact and multi-authorship patterns in articles in Information Science & Library Science journals

The aim of this paper is to extend the conversation about the correlation between collaboration and citation impact in articles in Information Science & Library Science journals by analyzing this correlation’s behavior using a power scaling law approach. 28,131 articles that received 215,693 citations were analyzed. The number of these articles that were published through collaboration accounts for 69%. In general, the scaling exponent of multi-authored articles, both international and domestic, increases over time while the exponent of single-authored papers decreases. The citation impact and collaboration patterns exhibit a power law correlation with a scaling exponent of 1.34 ± 0.02. Citations to multi-authored articles increased \(2^{1.34}\) or 2.53 times each time the number of multi-authored papers doubled. The Matthew Effect is stronger for multi-authored papers than for single-authored. The scaling exponent for the power law relationship of domestic multi-authored papers was 1.35 ± 0.02. The citations to domestic multi-authored articles increased \(2^{1.35}\) or 2.55 times each time the number of domestic multi-authored articles doubled. Contrary to previous studies we found that the Matthew Effect is stronger for domestic multi-authored papers than for international multi-authored ones.     

Information literacy in social sciences and health sciences: a bibliometric study (1974–2011)

We examine the international scientific productivity on information literacy since its inception in 1974 until late 2011, based on a bibliometric analysis of scientific articles included in the web of science and Scopus databases. The sample comprised two macro-domains—the most productive and the least productive. The former was the area of social sciences (SoS), covering such disciplines as information and documentation, communication, education, management, etc. The latter was the area of health sciences (HeS), covering such disciplines as medicine, nursing, etc. The objective of the study was to analyse the evolution of research activity during this period, taking into account the authors’ production, the distribution and co-authorship of the works, the affiliation, and the most frequently used journals. A quantitative and qualitative methodological approach was taken, based on statistical, mathematical, and content analyses. The results showed exponential growth of the scientific publications in both domains (R ² = 0.9544 for SoS, and R ² = 0.9393 for HeS), with a predominance of Anglo-Saxon authors. Author productivity was low (1.29 and 1.12 papers/author), while the dispersion of articles by journal averaged 4.96 in SoS and 1.86 in HeS. Scientific collaboration exceeded 53 % in the SoS domain and 69 % in HeS. There was a major dispersion of the places of the authors’ affiliation. In both domains, the author distributions fitted Lotka’s law, and the journal distributions Bradford’s Law.     

A bibliometric investigation on China–UK collaboration in food and agriculture

Based on data from the Web of Science, international collaboration between China and the UK in food and agriculture has been investigated from various perspectives. A new method for classifying cross- or multi-disciplinary fields has been created. The comparative study focuses on China’s collaboration with selected countries including the USA, the UK, Germany and Japan. The newly proposed Integrated Impact Indicator (I3) is applied to evaluate publication impact. Although China’s total publications dropped in 2010, its research productivity in food and agriculture nevertheless kept growing and international collaboration, reflected by the number of publications, also increased in an exponential way. The growth rate of China’s internationally collaborated publications was lower than that of China’s total publications. The USA, Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK and Germany are the top partners for Chinese researchers in this field. China-UK joint publications overall increased although their share in China’s total internationally collaborated publications decreased. To China, collaborating with the USA, the UK and Germany, instead of Japan, seems to offer an option to raise impact. The rapidly growing number of international publications and impact of Chinese research in food and agriculture offers great collaboration potential for the country. The fact that the average impact of China-UK collaborative publications is higher than the domestic publications of either country implies that collaboration benefits both sides as has been found in several other studies.     

Dentistry scientometric analysis: a comparative study between Brazil and other most productive countries in the area

This research aims at performing a comparative study between the Brazilian scientific production in Dentistry, from 2000 to 2009 and countries that contribute with at least 2 % of the world’s scientific production indexed in the Scopus database. More specifically, we intend to assess the annual Brazilian scientific production by comparing it to the other countries’, analyze the Brazilian and other countries’ publications in journals with higher impact factors, as well as to highlight the scientific production from these countries and its international visibility, measured by its total and by its average of citations and normalized citation index per year, by comparing the countries, and to compare the index h of such countries. As work procedure, the SCImago Journal and Country Rank was used as source, identifying the group of producing countries in the Dentistry area from 1996 to 2009. From a total of 136 countries, 13 were highlighted as the most productive, each one of them accounting for at least 2 % the worldwide scientific production in the area. The following indicators were raised for each country: number of produced documents, total of citations, self-citations, average of citations per document and index h. We verified that Brazil is the only country in Latin America that is pictured among the most productive ones in the Dentistry area. We observed that Brazil presents a growing visibility and impact in the international scenery, what suggests that its production is constantly consolidating, with Brazilian scientific recognition in the main vehicles of dissemination in the area.     

International Collaboration in Indian Scientific Papers

Internationally co-authored publications may be regarded as an indicator of scientific co-operation between countries and is of interest in science policy. In this study, the extent of international collaboration in Indian science has been estimated from SCI data in 1990 and 1994. We find an increase in collaboration both in terms of output and the extent of the network and significantly higher impact (IF) associated with internationally co-authored papers in several disciplines. However, there was no significant increase in IF of collaborative papers over time, whereas Indian papers in general showed a statistically significant, though small, increase in average impact from 1990 to 1994. The bulk of Indian scientific co-operation was with the developed Western nations and Japan, but it was often the smaller countries with a few co-authored papers which showed higher average impact. Co-operation with South Asian countries, initially low, has doubled in four years. By a combination of multivariate data analysis techniques the relative positions of India's partners in scientific collaboration have been mapped with respect to the fields of co-operation.