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.     

Core-periphery,new clusters,or rising stars?: international scientific collaboration among ‘advanced’ countries in the era of globalization

Assuming the OECD member states as ‘advanced’ nations equipped with basic scientific capacities, the present research addresses the network configuration of these countries in international scientific collaboration and the transformation of this network along with globalization. The result suggests that geographical, linguistic, and economic affinities did not have a meaningful impact on the formation of co-authorship network between ‘advanced’ nations, different from previous research results which claimed their importance on international cooperation. Globalization facilitated by the development of information and transportation technologies was found to influence the co-authorship link between countries, but not to accelerate centralization of the network in the past 15 years. Though the core-periphery pattern still persists, new rising stars, which are Korea and Turkey, have emerged in the co-authorship network among ‘advanced’ nations. These two countries, having a rapid increase in the share of degree centrality from 1995 to 2010, had strategic financial support from the government which stimulated the collaboration between universities and industries and emphasized the development of science and engineering fields.     

The luminous intensity of regional ‘night-light’ output can predict the growing volume of published scientific research by ‘luminaries’ in developing countries

Scientometrics - Global scientific research output has experienced continuous and rapid growth during the last 20 years. The spatial and temporal variations of the international papers at...     

South–South research collaboration of countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC)

This study investigates South–South collaboration in research, and specifically collaboration among the 15 countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) as well as between the SADC and the rest of Africa. It was found that only 3% of SADC papers during 2005–2008 were jointly authored by researchers from two or more SADC countries (intra-regional collaboration), and only 5% of SADC papers were jointly authored with researchers from African countries outside the SADC (continental collaboration). In contrast, 47% of SADC papers were co-authored with scientists from high-income countries. The few instances of intra-regional and continental collaboration in the SADC are largely the product of North–South collaboration. Authors from high-income countries are included in 60% of intra-regional co-authored papers and in 59% of continental co-authored papers. Moreover, between 2005 and 2008, South Africa produced 81% of all SADC papers and 78% of all intra-regional co-authored papers. This implies that there is a highly unbalanced and unequal partnership that can best be described as a variant of North–South collaboration with the scientific giant in the South taking on the role of the ‘political North’. As a consequence, guidelines for successful North–South collaborations should be extended to include South–South collaborations that comprise highly unequal partners, as is the case between South Africa and the other SADC countries.     

Mapping the evolving patterns of patent assignees’ collaboration networks and identifying the collaboration potential

The purpose of this article is to map the evolving patterns of patent assignees’ collaboration networks and build a latent collaboration index (LCI) model for evaluating the collaboration probability among assignees. The demonstration process was carried on the field of industrial biotechnology (IB) from 2000 to 2010. The results show that the number of assignees in the field of IB grew steadily, while the number of patents decreased slowly year by year after it reached peak in 2002 and 2003. Densification and growth analysis, average degree, density and components analysis showed that the collaboration networks tended to density. Especially the diameter analysis indicated that the IB field had come into a mature mode after finishing the topological transition occurred in about 2002 or 2003. The nodes had degree k followed a power law distribution, which implied a preferential linking feature of the network evolving and thus provided a foundation for link prediction from the aspect of network evolving. Basing on this, two network-related factors had been brought into the LCI model, which were degree and network distance. Their values were positive and negative for link prediction respectively. In addition, types of assignees, geographical distances and topics similarities had also been added into the LCI model. Different types of assignees had also different probabilities to be linked, such as corporations had been collaborated more frequently, while universities ranked lowest based on collaborations. Assignees from the same countries seemed to be likely to collaborate to each other. It have to been noted that the LCI model is flexible that can be adjusted of the factors or their weights according to different subjects, time or data. For instance, the topics similarities between assignees would be removed from the LCI model for link prediction in the field of IB because of the poor inference from topics similarities to collaborations. Actually, many promising pairs of assignees that seemed to have the potential to collaborate to each other according to one or more of these factors have never collaborated. One possible reason might be that collaboration is not popular behaviours among assignees during the process of patent application or maintain. Another reason could be the competitions between assignees. Many a time the promising pairs are competing pairs. Therefore, it was hard to carry out regression analysis basing on those four factors to get usable coefficients set of the four factors. The LCI model could only be used to make qualitative analysis on collaboration potential when it was revised.     

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.     

Yesterday’s giants and invisible colleges of today. A study on the ‘knowledge transfer’ scientific domain

Despite ‘knowledge transfer’ emerged as a separate field of study at least three decades ago, its academic literature remains rather fragmented. To reduce complexity, several journals’ special issues have attempted to frame up the literature both in a qualitative way and in a quantitative manner. Although these reviews help to bring some order to a flourishing literature, the theoretical background of knowledge transfer field of study still needs clarification. Who are their foremost scholars? How do they gather in visible or invisible colleges? How far the scientific communities of such domain have evolved over time? Has the knowledge transfer topic gained the status of an independent scientific domain? This article aims at shedding light on the knowledge transfer domain by mapping the invisible colleges on which the discipline is based. Drawing evidence from a network analysis of the backwards citations of the second generation of knowledge transfer studies, the authors point out that although the entire scientific domain has reached a strongly connected international dimension, it still manifests a persistent fragmentation. The paradoxical presence of a popular scientific domain without a proper independent theoretical body is consequently underlined.     

What’s in a name? Exploring the conceptual structure of emerging organizations

Scientometrics - This study describes the conceptual structure of emerging organisations on the basis of research over the past 26 years. During this period, terms and theoretical...     

‘Carte du Ciel’: Sydney Observatory's Role in the International Project to Photograph the Heavens

One of the most ambitious photographic projects the world has ever seen was announced at the 1887 International Astronomical Conference. Known as the Carte du Ciel’ or ‘Mapping the Stars’ project, its grand aim was to record on photographic plates the stars in the night sky. Worked on by eighteen observatories around the world, it was estimated that it would require 22,154 photographic plates. Although little known today, this project cemented the role of photography as a tool for astronomers and was in particular a major accomplishment for the Sydney Observatory, where it was worked on for over seventy years.     

Direct observation of the ‘hydrodynamic’ flow of the intermediate-state structure in pure indium

The influence of a static perturbation of the magnetic field on the current-induced motion of the normal and superconducting domains in a pure, uncompensated, type I superconductor (indium) in the intermediate state has been observed using a high-resolution magnetooptical technique. We report here these observations, which bring the first direct evidence of the nonlinear hydrodynamic flow properties of the intermediate state predicted by Andreev and which are closely related to the additional resistance recently observed by Krylov in the intermediate state of pure indium.Work performed with the financial support of the Fonds National Suisse pour la Recherche Scientifique.Visiting Scientist under the auspices of the Swiss-Russian Scientific Exchange Program.     

Innovation and growth in KIBS: the role of clients’ collaboration and service customisation

In this paper, we analyse KIBS firms and posit that two core attributes of KIBS, namely collaborative relationships with clients and product customisation, foster the ability to develop successful, new product innovations. We disentangle the role of customisation and collaboration choices by looking at how they jointly affect the impact of innovation over firms’ performance, asking to what extent and how firms should collaborate with clients and customise their services. We test our hypotheses on a sample of Italian KIBS firms. Our results show that product innovations that are new to the industry are relevant and, counter intuitively, show that most growing KIBS firms do not have the highest service customisation and collaboration breadth with their clients. Most growing firms develop mass customisation strategies and they leverage on focused collaboration strategies with clients.     

A methodology to evaluate the usability of digital socialization in ‘‘virtual’’ engineering design

We develop a methodology to evaluate the usability of prototypes for supporting digital socialization within geographically dispersed, or “virtual”, engineering design teams. Socialization converts individual into group tacit knowledge to enhance collaborative work. Extant theory in computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) underpins IDRAK, a proof-of-concept prototype of a rich Internet application to promote socialization. Our methodology employs an engineering design exercise (Delta design, as in Bucciarelli (Delta design game, MIT, Cambridge, 1994) to simulate, in a computer lab, a virtual team undertaking a project feasibility stage. We apply this methodology to evaluate the usability of IDRAK to support “virtual” four-people teams (architect, project manager, thermal and structural engineers). Our findings yield few statistically significant differences between the performance of virtual and co-located teams. The experiments suggest that IDRAK encourages individuals to work collaboratively. It allows for a leveling of status and eases communication since individuals’ accents are not an issue. However, IDRAK makes it difficult for the project manager to exercise authority and it cannot capture nuances in speech such as tone and expression. The experiments suggest that more research is needed to explore the ways to enhance the performance of virtual teams by: first, alternating between voice/video and text-based chat; second, documenting chat-based conversations; and third, enforcing communication and design process protocols.

When a journal is both at the ‘top’ and the ‘bottom’: the illogicality of conflating citation-based metrics with quality

Scientometrics - The ‘quality’, ‘prestige’, and ‘impact’ of a scholarly journal is largely determined by the number of citations its articles receive....     

Photography in the Szondi Test: ‘The Analysis of Fate’

Léopold Szondi invented a projective test using photographs of people with mental pathologies to determine the unconscious, ancestral illnesses (or aptitudes) of his subjects. Szondi’s images were garnered from psychiatric textbooks published around 1900. Such photographs presumably revealed unconscious thoughts, desires, and destinies in the course of a test session. If a patient responded positively to a photo-portrait of a diagnosed ‘hysteric’, for instance, this indicated that the subject herself had unconscious, inherited hysterical traits. Szondi’s reasoning was predicated upon two commonly held fallacies: first that an individual’s physical appearance is the external marker of mental life, and second that photography is a transparent means of revealing true facts. In spite of (or maybe even because of) such problematic assumptions, Szondi’s use of photographs can be located historically in a tradition of reading human character from portraiture. The test was widespread, and was even administered to Adolf Eichmann at the time of his trial in Jerusalem – an ironic cultural development as Szondi himself would have been among the thousands of Jews deported from Hungary directly to Auschwitz by Eichmann had the Szondi family not been rescued by the Kastner train of 1944.     

‘Multiplying Statues by Machinery’: Stereoscopic Photographs of Sculptures at the 1862 International Exhibition

This article focuses on the photographs of sculptures, in particular Raffaelle Monti’s veiled figures, taken by the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company at the 1862 International Exhibition, to explore the relationship between vision and touch in the appeal of stereographs. Their apparent simplicity as reproductions of works of art belies a rich formal and conceptual complexity that attends to many of the issues raised by the Exhibition and its critics, at the time and since. The appeal of stereographs of sculptures can be conceptualised in the consonance between sculpture and photography as media that relied on mechanical production and reproduction, making the shift from sculpture to stereo one of different iterations rather than translation from one medium to another – both relied on the disavowal of the anonymous, mechanical labour that went into making them.     

Benefit distribution mechanism in the team members’ scientific research collaboration network

Scientific research collaboration networks are well-established research topics, which can be divided into two kinds of research paradigms: (1) The topological features of the whole scientific collaboration networks and the collaboration representations in some given fields. (2) The individual nodes’ characteristics in the collaboration networks and their endorsements in the networks. However, in the above studies, all the nodes’ roles in the scientific collaboration network are the same, all of whom are called collaborators, thus the relationships among all the nodes in the scientific collaboration network are symmetric, and the scientific collaboration network is undirected. Such symmetric roles and relationships in the undirected networks have no incentive effects on the members’ participations and efforts in the team’s scientific research. In this paper, the roles of team members in the scientific research collaborations are defined, including the scientific research pioneers and contributors, their collaboration relationships are considered from the viewpoint of principal-agent theory, and then the directed scientific collaboration network is built. Then the benefit distribution mechanism in the team members’ networked scientific research collaborations is presented, which will encourage the team members with different roles to make their efforts in their scientific research collaborations and improve the quality of scientific research outputs. An example is used to test the above ideas and conclude that the individual member’s real outputs not only lie in his/her real scientific research efforts, but also rest with his/her contributions to other members’ scientific research.     

An analysis of the connection between researchers’ productivity and their co-authors’ past attributions,including the importance in collaboration networks

Although many studies have analyzed the “synchronic” correlation of properties between authors and their co-authors, the “diachronic” correlation of properties, i.e., the correlation between their subsequent and precedent activity, has not yet been sufficiently studied using quantitative methods. This study pays attention not only to productivity but also the importance in the collaboration network as a measure of the researcher’s activity, and clarifies whether there is any connection between (i) the researcher’s activity subsequent to a collaboration and (ii) the collaborator’s precedent activity, aiming at deriving knowledge about the diachronic effect of collaborators.