Abstract
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.
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Notes
For example, the CNCI value of China’s domestic publications in the 5-year period 2011–2015 is 0.86, while the CNCI value of China’s internationally co-authored papers is 1.43, which is significantly higher than the global baseline 1.0.
Only when the first affiliation of the first author (according to the orders of authors in the paper by-line) or the first corresponding author is a Chinese affiliation, is the co-authored HCP regarded as an HCP with Chinese researchers as first or corresponding authors.
The reason we use the ten-year period 2008–2017 instead of 2006–2015 as we have previously in the paper is because: (1) The highly cited papers are now only available in the Web of Science for the recent eleven years 2007–2017. (2) The information for all authors is complete only from 2008 on.
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Acknowledgements
The present study is an extended version of a paper (Zhang et al. 2017) presented at the 16th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics, Wuhan (China), 16–20 October 2017. Special thanks to Professor Ying Cheng at Graduate School of Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University who gave valuable comments and suggestions in revising this paper.
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Zhang, Z., Rollins, J.E. & Lipitakis, E. China’s emerging centrality in the contemporary international scientific collaboration network. Scientometrics 116, 1075–1091 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2788-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2788-5