Intra-EU vs. extra-EU scientific co-publication patterns in EU

The increase of co-authored papers is a recognized fact. At the same time the factors influencing this change is not well known. This article aims at studying the patterns of EU science co-authorships. We analyzed articles published in 18 EU countries and their intra-EU (within EU) and extra-EU (with partners outside EU) co-publication pattern in five scientific fields. The results point to a Europeanisation of shared co-authorship rather than an internationalization outside Europe. Smaller countries co-authored more with other EU countries than bigger countries while the co-authorship rate with extra-EU partners was not dependent of the country’s size. The co-authorship patterns were also found to depend on the scientific field. Engineering and Computing & Technology was the field with the highest level of national publications and Physical, Chemical & Earth Sciences the field with the highest level of both intra-EU and extra-EU collaborations. These results support the view that a single market for research is developing within the EU with a seamless extension of national systems into other Member States ones.     

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.     

Trend and efficiency analysis of co-authorship network

Although co-authorship in scientific research has a long history the analysis of co-authorship network to explore scientific collaboration among authors is a relatively new research area. Studies of current literature about co-authorship networks mostly give emphasis to understand patterns of scientific collaborations, to capture collaborative statistics, and to propose valid and reliable measures for identifying prominent author(s). However, there is no such study in the literature which conducts a longitudinal analysis of co-authorship networks. Using a dataset that spans over 20 years, this paper attempts to explore efficiency and trend of co-authorship networks. Two scientists are considered connected if they have co-authored a paper, and these types of connections between two scientists eventually constitute co-authorship networks. Co-authorship networks evolve among researchers over time in specific research domains as well as in interdisciplinary research areas. Scientists from diverse research areas and different geographical locations may participate in one specific co-authorship network whereas an individual scientist may belong to different co-authorship networks. In this paper, we study a longitudinal co-authorship network of a specific scientific research area. By applying approaches to analyze longitudinal network data, in addition to known methods and measures of current co-authorship literature, we explore a co-authorship network of a relatively young and emerging research discipline to understand its trend of evolution pattern and proximity of efficiency.     

A bibliometric analysis of publications by the School of Biological Sciences, Seoul National University, South Korea

This study presents an in-depth survey of research and citation performance of the School of Biological Sciences (SBS) 39-member faculty at Seoul National University (SNU), the most prestigious university in South Korea, for the years 2004–2009. Thirty-nine faculty members published a total of 640 publications during the period, representing an average of 16.4 publications per scientist. Among the 640 publications, 521 (81.4 %) were cited 9,204 times, an average of 14.4 citations per publication. More publications co-authored by the SBS faculty with foreign researchers (mostly from the U.S.A.) were published in mainstream journals than publications by three other co-authorship types. Accordingly, publications by international co-authorships received more citations compared to citation levels of three other co-authorship types in terms of the average citations per publication. The study has found a concentration effect, whereby quite a small number of publications received approximately one-third of the citation performance generated by the SBS faculty at SNU. The results demonstrate that the citation performance of the SBS at SNU can be influenced considerably by the presence and productivity of ‘star’ scientists.     

National characteristics in international scientific co-authorship relations

The main objective of this study is the elaboration of national characteristics in internationalscientific co-authorship relations. An attempt is made to find statistical evidence of symmetry andasymmetry in co-publication links, of the relation between international co-authorship and bothnational research profiles and citation impact. Four basic types can be distinguished in the relativespecialisation of domestic and internationally co-authored publications of 50 most activecountries in 1995/96 concerning the significance of the difference between the two profiles.Co-publication maps reveal structural changes in international co-authorship links in the lastdecade. Besides stable links and coherent clusters, new nodes and links have also been found. Notall links between individual countries are symmetric. Specific (unidirectional) co-authorshipaffinity could also be detected in several countries.As expected, international co-authorship, on an average, results in publications with highercitation rates than purely domestic papers. However, the influence of international collaborationon the national citation impact varies considerably between the countries (and within oneindividual country between fields). In some cases there is, however, no citation advantage for oneor even for both partners.     

Mapping research collaborations in the business and management field in Malaysia, 1980–2010

This paper examines research collaborations in the field of business and management in Malaysia, a fast-developing economy in Southeast Asia. The country aims to become a developed nation by the year 2020, guided by its well-charted Wawasan 2020 or Vision 2020 program. Research and development are important agenda items within this program. Rarely, however, have studies investigated the research collaborations of researchers based in Malaysia from the network perspective. After a manual author disambiguation process, we examined the network of 285 business and management researchers at the individual, institutional, and international levels. Author collaborations per paper almost doubled between 2001 and 2010 compared to the period 1980–1990. The popularity of researchers and the strength and diversity of their ties with other researchers had significant effects on their research performance. Furthermore, geographical proximity still mattered in intra-national collaborations. Malaysian institutions more often collaborated intra-institutionally or with foreign partners than with other institutions within Malaysia. The country’s five research universities are among the top-most productive of all institutions in Malaysia. Malaysia’s top international partners are all developed countries, including the US, Australia, Japan, the UK, and Canada. Surprisingly, Malaysia has had relatively little collaboration with ASEAN nations, of which it is a prominent member and which has an important agenda of educational cooperation within its member states. Internationally co-authored articles have been cited almost three times more than locally co-authored articles. Based on these results, we suggest an effective co-authorship strategy.     

Mapping the dynamics of knowledge base of innovations of R&;D in Bangladesh: triple helix perspective

Triple helix (TH) collaborations involving university, industry and government provide a networked infrastructure for shaping the dynamic fluxes of knowledge base of innovations locally and these fluxes remain emergent within the domains. This study maps these emergence dynamics of the knowledge base of innovations of Research & Development (R&D) by exploring the longitudinal trend of systemness within the networked research relations in Bangladesh on the TH model. The bibliometric data of publications collected from the Science Citation Index (SCI), the social sciences and the arts and humanities for analysis of science indicators and the patent data collected from the US Patent Office to analyze the patent success ratio as a measure of innovation within TH domains. The findings show that the network dynamics have varied considerably according to the R&D policies of the government. The collaboration patterns of co-authorship relations in the SCI publications prominently increased, with some variation, from 1996 to 2006. Nevertheless, inter-institutional collaboration negatively influenced by the national science and technology (S&T) research policies in the last 5 years due to their evaluation criteria. Finally, the findings reveal that the R&D system of Bangladesh is still undergoing a process of institutionalizing S&T and has failed to boost its research capacity for building the knowledge base of innovations by neglecting the network effects of TH dynamics.     

Has globalization strengthened South Korea’s national research system? National and international dynamics of the Triple Helix of scientific co-authorship relationships in South Korea

We trace the structural patterns of co-authorship between Korean researchers at three institutional types (university, government, and industry) and their international partners in terms of the mutual information generated in these relations. Data were collected from the Web of Science during the period 1968–2009. The traditional Triple-Helix indicator was modified to measure the evolving network of co-authorship relations. The results show that international co-authorship relations have varied considerably over time and with changes in government policies, but most relations have become stable since the early 2000s. In other words, the national publication system of Korea has gained some synergy from R&D internationalization during the 1990s, but the development seems to stagnate particularly at the national level: whereas both university and industrial collaborations are internationalized, the cross-connection within Korea has steadily eroded.     

International and domestic co-publishing and their citation impact in different disciplines

This paper studies disciplinary differences in citation impacts of different types of co-publishing. The citation impacts of international, domestic inter-organizational and domestic intra-organizational co-publications, and single-authored publications, are compared. In particular, we examine the extent to which the number of authors explains the potential differences in citation impacts when compared to the influence of different types of international and domestic collaborations. The analysis is based on Finland’s publications in Thomson Reuters Web of Science database in 1990–2008. Finland is a small country, thus, it has fewer opportunities to find collaborators inside own country when compared to larger countries. Finland’s science policy has underlined internationalization and research collaboration as key means to increase the quality and impact of Finnish research. This study indicates that both international and domestic co-publishing have steadily increased during the past two decades in all disciplinary groups. International co-publications gain on average more citations than domestic co-publications. In natural sciences and engineering, co-authorship explains only a small proportion of variability in publications’ citation rates. When the effect of the number of authors is taken into account there are no big differences in citation impacts between international and domestic co-publications. However, international co-publications by ten authors or more gather significantly more citations than other publications. In humanities, the difference in citation impacts between co-authored publications in relation to single-authored publications is significant. However, international co-publications are not on average more highly cited in relation to domestic co-publications in humanities.     

The role of Chinese universities in enterprise–university research collaboration

In this paper the role of Chinese universities in enterprise–university research collaboration is investigated. This study focuses on a special aspect of the collaboration—co-authored articles. The two cases are analyzed: (1) research collaboration between Baosteel Group Corporation and Chinese universities; (2) research collaboration between China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation and Chinese universities. The co-authorship data over the period 1998–2007 were searched from CNKI database, the largest Chinese publication and citation database. The main findings are as follows: the number of articles co-authored by enterprise and university scientists has been increasing rapidly; the share of co-authored articles has been growing; the authors from universities are more possible to be the first authors; as a whole, enterprise–university co-authored articles tend to receive more citations and get downloaded more frequently; a mathematical orientation emerges in the enterprise–university articles. To reveal and describe such a trend the methods of keywords analysis and co-occurrence analysis are applied. The Chinese government’s policy instruments and substantial supports for pushing and improving enterprise–university research collaboration are introduced and analyzed.     

Towards hybrid Triple Helix indicators: A study of university-related patents and a survey of academic inventors

This paper presents work directed at capturing the entrepreneurial and collaborative activity of university researchers. The Triple Helix points to the emergence of the entrepreneurial university as well as to an increasing overlay of activities in universities, industry and government. This study explores ways in which patent-based metrics could be utilized in a Triple Helix context, and how hybrid indicators could be developed by combining patent with survey data. More specifically, it aims to develop indicators that connect technological inventiveness of university researchers to both funding organizations and users, as well as to entrepreneurial activities by academics. The paper develops a simplified model of the innovation process to benchmark the relevance of the indicators to the Triple Helix. An analysis of Finnish academic patents illustrates that patent data can already provide useful indicators but, on its own, cannot provide information about how academic patents are interconnected with government or industry through funding or utilization links. An exclusive analysis of patents can point to patent concentrations on certain universities, to inventors and assignees, or to potential gaps in translating applied science into industrial technology. However, the patent data had to be combined with an inventor survey in order to relate academic patents more to their Triple Helix environment. The survey indicated that most patented academic inventions are connected to (often publicly funded) scientific research by the inventors and tend to be utilized in large firms rather than in start-up companies founded by academic entrepreneurs.     

Measuring the stability of scientific collaboration

Stability has long been regarded as an important characteristic of many natural and social processes. In regards to scientific collaborations, we define stability to reflect the consistent investment of a certain amount of effort into a relationship. In this paper, we provide an explicit definition of a new indicator of stability, based on the year-to-year publication output of collaborations. We conduct a large-scale analysis of stability among collaborations between authors publishing in the field of computer science. Collaborations with medium–high degree of stability tend to occur most frequently, and on average, have the highest average scientific impact. We explore other “circumstances”, reflecting the composition of collaborators, that may interact with the relationship between stability and impact, and show that (1) Transdisciplinary collaborations with low stability leads to high impact publications; (2) Stable collaboration with the collaborative author pairs showing greater difference in scientific age or career impact can produce high impact publications; and (3) Highly-cited collaborators whose publications have a large number of co-authors do not keep stable collaborations. We also demonstrate how our indicator for stability can be used alongside other similar indicators, such as persistence, to better understand the nature of scientific collaboration, and outline a new taxonomy of collaborations.     

Effect of collaboration network structure on knowledge creation and technological performance: the case of biotechnology in Canada

Many of the novel ideas that lead to scientific publications or yield technological advances are the result of collaborations among scientists or inventors. Although various aspects of collaboration networks have been examined, the impact of many network characteristics on knowledge creation and innovation production remains unclear due to the inconsistency of the conclusions from various research studies. One such network structure, called small world, has recently attracted much theoretical attention as it has been suggested that it can enhance the information transmission efficiency among the network actors. However, the existing empirical studies have failed to provide consistent results regarding the effect of small-world network properties on network performance in terms of its scientific and technological productivity. In this paper, using the data on 29 years of journal publications and patents in the field of biotechnology in Canada, the network of scientists’ collaboration activities has been constructed based on their co-authorships in scientific articles. Various structural properties of this network have been measured and the relationships between the network structure and knowledge creation, and quantity and quality of technological performance have been examined. We found that the structure of the co-authorship network of Canadian biotechnology scientists has a significant effect on the knowledge and innovation production, but it produced no impact on the quality of patents generated by these scientists.     

Modelling and measuring multilateral co-authorship in international scientific collaboration. Part I. Development of a new model using a series expansion approach

International co-operation has strongly intensified during the last decades owing to rapid developments in scientific communication. Economic, political, and intra-scientific factors also strongly influence international collaboration links among individual countries. Obviously research results of international scientific co-operation are reflected in the documented scientific communication as international co-authorship links in scientific publications. Most bibliometric studies on this issue pertain to the share of international co-authored papers in national publication output and their impact on national and international research, or to the analysis and mapping of the structure of collaboration links. The present study attempts to develop a model to measure and analyse the extent of multilateral international co-authorship links. A new indicator, the Multilateral Collaboration Index (ρ) is introduced and analysed as a function of the share of internationally co-authored papers (f). Based onf a series expansion approach is applied that can be considered an extension of a fractionation model byNederhof andMoed and allows classifying the extent of multilateral links both among science fields and among individual countries. The paper is concluded by a first attempt to estimate the errors involved in our approach.     

Co-author inclusion: A novel recursive algorithmic method for dealingwith homonyms in bibliometric analysis

Summary Large scale bibliometric analysis is often hindered by the presence of homonyms, or namesakes, of the researchers of interest in literature databases. This makes it difficult to build up a true picture of a researcher's publication record, as publications by another researcher with the same name will be included in search results. Using additional information such as title and author addresses, an expert in the field can generally tell if a paper is by a researcher or a namesake; however, manual checking is not practical in large scale studies. Previously various methods have been used to address this problem, chiefly based on filtering by subject, funding acknowledgement or author address. Co-author inclusion is a novel algorithmic method based on co-authorship for dealing with problems of homonyms in large bibliometric surveys. We compared co-author inclusion and subject and funding based filter against the manual assignment of papers by a subject expert (which we assumed to be correct). The subject and funding based filtering identifies only 75% as many papers as assigned by manual scoring. By using co-author inclusion once we increase this to 95%, two further rounds produces 99% as many papers as manual filtering. Although the number of papers identified that were not assigned to the PIs manually also increases, the absolute number is low: rising from 0.2% papers with subject and funding filtering, to 3% papers for three rounds of co-author inclusion.     

The relationship between co-authorship,currency of references and author self-citations

This paper attempts to identify the relationship between co-authorship and the currency of the references and author self-citations in the key journals of environmental engineering. The results show that the self-citation rate of co-authored articles is higher than in single-authored articles. A statistically significant correlation is identified between the numbers of co-authors, the rate of author self-citing and the author self-cited; though it was a low correlation. The value of coefficient correlation between the number of co-authors and the author self-citing rate is slightly higher than that between the number of co-authors and the author self-cited rate, which indicates that the number of co-authors hold a stronger correlation with the self-citing rate than the self-cited rate. Meanwhile, self-citing references are found to be more up-to-date than references to others. The range of publication years of self-citing references is smaller than that of references to others, indicating that researchers tend to preferentially cite their own recent works. There is no significant difference in the latest references between self-citing references and the references to others. It might result from electronic journals that provide an easy access to the most current publications.     

A study of collaboration in laser science and technology

An analysis of 3174 papers published in journals in the field of laserscience and technology indicate that only 401 papers were single authoredand the rest 2773 were co-authored papers. Of the 2773 papers, only 687 werewritten in local (inter-departmental), domestic (inter-institutional) andinternational collaboration. As reflected by the values of collaborative coefficientand co-authorship index, it is observed that the proportion of mega-authoredpapers for Japan, France, Italy, and the Netherlands was more, while for Canada,China, and Australia the proportion of single authored papers was more. Mostof the collaborative papers had bilateral domestic and international collaboration.Domestic collaborations were higher for USA, Japan, France and Australia,while international collaboration was higher for China, Israel, the Netherlands,and Switzerland. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The resilience of regional African HIV/AIDS research networks to the withdrawal of international authors in the subfield of public administration and governance: lessons for funders and collaborators

This paper compares the position and performance of Africans in international research networks, comparing a well-funded and internationally driven research network against a network developing organically with less funding and oversight. Specifically, we map the co-authorship networks related to African governance and public policy (1) in general and (2) related to HIV/AIDS. In both research networks Africans are well positioned globally, but African authors have lower connectivity and status in the HIV/AIDS network than the general network. Links between authors in different African countries are often bridged by non-Africans. This makes the African research networks vulnerable to shifting funding priorities; and international dropout would fragment the HIV/AIDS network more than the general network. We conclude that funders and researchers should prioritize direct inter-country African collaborations to improve the resilience of African research networks.     

The conundrum of research productivity: a study on sociologists in Italy

This paper aims to understand the influence of institutional and organisational embeddedness on research productivity of Italian sociologists. We looked at all records published by Italian sociologists in Scopus from 1973 to 2016 and reconstructed their co-authorship patterns. We built an individual productivity index by considering the number and type of records, the impact factor of journals in which these records were published and each record’s citations. We found that sociologists who co-authored more frequently with international authors were more productive and that having a stable group of co-authors had a positive effect on the number of publications but not on citations. We found that organisational embeddedness has a positive effect on productivity at the group level (i.e., sociologists working in the same institute), less at the individual level. We did not found any effect of the scientific disciplinary sectors, which are extremely influential administratively and politically for promotion and career in Italy. With all caveats due to several limitations of our analysis, our findings suggest that internationalisation and certain context-specific organisational settings could promote scientist productivity .