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Is there convergence in international research collaboration? An exploration at the country level in the basic and applied science fields

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Abstract

This paper examines the patterns of convergence in international scientific collaboration across a set of developed and developing countries from 1997 through 2012. The empirical analysis was carried out in a novel way applying the methodology developed by Phillips and Sul (Econometrica 75:1771–1855, 2007; J Appl Econom 24:1153–1185, 2009) to international co-publication data from a US National Science Foundation dataset (NSF in National Center for Science and Engineering statistics, http://www.nsf.gov/, 2014). First, the convergence analysis across countries is carried out for all research fields combined and, secondly, for the basic and applied science fields separately. The results suggest that there has not been an overall convergence in international scientific collaboration patterns during the analyzed period. In contrast, there is evidence of four scientific convergence clubs and three divergent countries in the aggregate of all research fields. However, our results seem to indicate that there is a tendency toward a gradual convergence among the more scientifically developed countries. The results also show the existence of international research collaboration convergence clubs for the fields of basic science research and applied science with five and four convergence clubs, respectively.

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Fig. 1

Source: Own elaboration

Fig. 2

Source: Own elaboration

Fig. 3

Source: US National Science Foundation dataset (NSF 2014) and own elaboration

Fig. 4

Source: US National Science Foundation dataset (NSF 2014) and own elaboration

Fig. 5

Source: US National Science Foundation dataset (NSF 2014) and own elaboration

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Notes

  1. See Cheng et al. (2019) for a recent review of the literature on international collaboration.

  2. While the hypotheses of absolute and conditional convergence are based on models that assume the uniqueness of equilibrium, the club convergence hypothesis assumes that the economic system is characterized by multiple equilibriums.

  3. In the National Science Foundation dataset article counts are from the set of journals covered by the Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) (NSF 2014).

  4. The authors classify scientific fields based on the consensus in the previous literature, pointing out that chemistry and biological sciences were the most discussed sectors, choosing to include the first within the basic field and the second within the applied field.

  5. Regarding international collaboration, the National Science Foundation (NSF) (2014) dataset includes countries with more than 1% of internationally co-authored articles in 2012.

  6. We used UCINET 6.0 software (Borgatti et al. 2002) for obtaining network metrics and NewDraw for network visualization.

  7. Salton’s measure is a direct similarity measure widely applied to normalize co-occurrence data (van Eck and Waltman 2009) (see for instance, Luukkonen et al. 1993; He 2009; Schubert and Sooryamoorthy 2010; Wagner et al. 2017).

  8. This cutoff point has been used in other studies on collaboration networks applying network analysis techniques (e.g., Choi 2012); it allows a more useful visualization of the collaboration network.

  9. The number of maximum ties is calculated as (40 * 39)/2 = 780 because the matrix is symmetric.

  10. Core/Periphery fit (correlation) was 81.28% in 1997 and 75.25% in 2012.

  11. The importance of multinational collaboration between these new cores has been emphasised in other studies, for instance, Gorraiz et al. (2012).

  12. The World Bank classifies countries into four groups economically: high income, upper middle income, lower middle income, and low income (World Bank 2010).

  13. Haustein et al. (2011) found that Asian-Pacific countries such as China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, with high scientific output, had a smaller percentage of international co-publication.

  14. The increase in scientific collaboration between BRIC countries during the 2000s has been shown in diverse studies (for instance, Finardi 2015).

  15. As Glänzel and Schubert (2005: 336) point out: “co-authorship domesticity is clearly influenced by at least two main factors: country size (it is evidently easier for a US or UK researcher to find domestic collaboration partners than for a colleague from Hungary or Belgium) and country remoteness (made up of geographic, linguistic, political, etc., components)”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Economía Aplicada y Métodos Cuantitativos, Universidad de La Laguna, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain

    Candelaria Barrios

  2. Department of Economics, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, University of Cadiz, C/ Avenida Enrique Villegas Vélez, no 2, 11002, Cádiz, Spain

    Esther Flores & M. Ángeles Martínez

  3. Department of Business Management, University of Cadiz, Cádiz, Spain

    Marta Ruiz-Martínez

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  1. Candelaria Barrios
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  2. Esther Flores
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  4. Marta Ruiz-Martínez
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Correspondence to Esther Flores.

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Barrios, C., Flores, E., Martínez, M.Á. et al. Is there convergence in international research collaboration? An exploration at the country level in the basic and applied science fields. Scientometrics 120, 631–659 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03133-9

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