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Growth patterns of the network of international collaboration in science

Scientometrics volume 114, pages 159–179 (2018)Cite this article

Abstract

International knowledge flows might be eroding national borders of innovation systems and contributing for the emergence of an international system of innovation. This paper investigates how far the scientific international collaboration has developed and how stable the structure of those collaborations is, evaluating the properties of those networks and their long term behaviour. The data collected and analyzed show that international collaboration has been growing with a peculiar pattern—faster than an exponential growth-, shaping a scale-free network that has preserved its structure while it grows. This paper analyses the properties of this network and the implications of those properties for an emerging global innovation system in terms of growth, hierarchy, opportunity, challenges, and robustness and for the generation and transfer of technology

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Notes

  1. WebOfScience has 252 different S&E disciplines. To process those data by more aggregated areas we applied Braun et al. (1995a, b) suggestion - as close as possible: 170 S&E disciplines were aggregated into 27 fields. In this aggregation 82 S&E disciplines were not used, since they are related to human and social sciences and have no correspondence in the aggregation strategy of Braun et al. (1995a, b).

  2. We do as Wagner and Leydesdorff (2005) that uses all types of documents in their analysis.

  3. Barabási describes this moment (2016, chapter 0, personal introduction): "Could the WWW be still broken into many disconnected components? Or is it already one big network, as everyone perceived it back then? These were intriguing questions, no matter the outcome. To answer it we needed the Web’s degree distribution, which was now provided by Hawoong's robot. The data granted us our first real surprise: We did not see the Poisson distribution that random network theory predicted. A power law greeted us instead".

  4. A very didactic explanation of the relationship between of phenomena following a power law and the scale-free nature of networks can be found in Barabási (2016, Sect. 4.2).

  5. The prominent position of the USA and China in 2015 is related both with their size but also with the level of formation of their scientific institutions. If we look to the data for 2000, China was only in the eighth position—a previous stage of their then growing scientific infrastructure.

  6. In this analysis the country of the paper is attributed to the address of the first author.

  7. The relationship between income and the formation of national systems of innovation is discussed in a previous paper (Ribeiro et al. 2006).

  8. Exceptions: Qatar and very small European countries—Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino.

  9. In the collaboration network the links represent the scientific co-authorship between two institutions for each article indexed in the ISI database. Then, if two institutions have published in collaboration, for example, one hundred articles, it will be generated also one hundred links between the nodes that represent those two institutions. Therefore, the quantity of links among the institutions in the network represents the intensity of the collaboration among those institutions.

  10. Wagner et al .(2015, p. 6) analyze data from 1990 to 2011, and find a growth in the "number of coauthor relationships (links)" that is "disproportionately large compared to the growth in the number of addresses".

  11. A comparison with patent citation of ISI-indexed paper as a knowledge flow for firms and co-authorship of scientific papers: in 2009, the leading firm in patents with citation of ISI-indexed paper was Microsoft, with 333 patents - or links (Ribeiro et al. 2014, Table 2, p. 72). Microsoft has more than 650 connections (links) through international co-authorship. The leading firm in connections through international co-authorship in our preliminary calculations is Novartis, with more than 5000 links.

  12. It could be intriguing to observe that our power law exponents are smaller than 2. This power law exponents corresponds to Baribási’s degrees of distribution exponents—see Barabási (2016, Image 4.2). Barabási (2016, Sect. 4.7) asks why we do not see networks with degree exponents smaller than 2. Our degrees exponents in Table 5 are smaller than 2 because our network in multi-link (our nodes, institutions, may have more links than one, but Barabási’s nodes have only one link).

  13. The total of network links in Table 6 is greater than the sum of collaboration RI-Firm and Firm-Firm in Table 2 because for the distribution of connectivity analysis in Table 6 the nodes (papers) that show at least one Firm as author are selected and, then, all their connections are analyzed—regardless if the connection originates from one of their Firm or RI author. This criteria is broader than the selection of connections of the type RI-Firm or Firm-Firm (Table 2) because in the former criteria also will be considered connections that originate from the other RI authors of the paper that shows Firm among theirs author and achieve RI authors of others countries papers—being a RI-RI connection. In the distribution of connectivity analysis of Table 6 we are just selecting from the Table 5 the subset of nodes that involves firms and comparing their global behavior (exponents) to see if there is a more homogenous distribution (lower exponent), i.e., lower hierarchy, or a more heterogeneous distribution (higher exponent), i.e., higher hierarchy when the firms nodes behavior is compared to the whole network behavior.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the financial support from CNPq (Processes 459627/2014-7, 302857/2015-0 and 401054/2016-0). We thank Giulia Tonon and José Carlos Miranda for research assistance. Comments, criticisms and suggestions from two anonimous referees from Scientometrics helped to improve our earlier version of this paper. The usual disclaimer holds.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Inmetro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Leonardo Costa Ribeiro

  2. UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil

    Márcia Siqueira Rapini, Leandro Alves Silva & Eduardo Motta Albuquerque

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  1. Leonardo Costa Ribeiro
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  2. Márcia Siqueira Rapini
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  3. Leandro Alves Silva
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  4. Eduardo Motta Albuquerque
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Correspondence to Eduardo Motta Albuquerque.

Appendix

Appendix

Document type Articles
Article 5.688.001
Meeting abstract 1.113.336
Proceedings paper 1.107.212
Editorial material 439.781
Book review 410.670
Article; proceedings paper 400.577
Review 311.397
Letter 232.354
News item 127.357
Correction 61.917
Poetry 31.037
Biographical-item 30.376
Art exhibit review 14.230
Film review 9.707
Record review 8.676
Review; book chapter 7.614
Fiction, creative prose 4.440
Article; book chapter 4.158
Theater review 2.995
Dance performance review 2.886
Reprint 2.756
Bibliography 1.889
Music score review 1.887
TV review, radio review 1.788
Music performance review 1.737
Software review 1.386
Excerpt 586
Editorial material; book chapt 522
Script 241
Database review 183
Music score 92
Hardware review 63
Biographical-item; book chapter 16
Meeting summary 8
Correction; book chapter 7
Letter; Book chapter 5
Main cite 5
Chronology 5
Reprint; book chapter 4
Review; book 3
Abstract of published item 3
Main cite; book chapter 2
Article; book 2
Book 1
  1. Source: WebOfScience, authors’ elaboration

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Ribeiro, L.C., Rapini, M.S., Silva, L.A. et al. Growth patterns of the network of international collaboration in science. Scientometrics 114, 159–179 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2573-x

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Keywords

  • Knowledge flows
  • International co-authorships
  • Science
  • Innovation systems