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How the Covid-19 crisis shaped research collaboration behaviour

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Abstract

The paper explores the impact of Covid-19 on scientists' collaboration behaviour in the 14 countries with the largest research output. The approach is bibliometric, taking the unit of analysis of collaborations as the individual researchers and the co-authorships in their preprints. The time plot of the data confirms a clear discontinuity in the number of preprint depositions after the Covid-19 outbreak. Less evident is the discontinuity in average number of co-authors per preprint, and also in propensity to collaborate. Investigating further, a multivariate econometric analysis shows that for propensity to national collaboration (both intra- and extramural) there has been a positive “effect” from the pandemic, but negative one on international collaboration. The same analysis conducted by country, however, reveals that these effects are significant only in some countries and often with discordant signs.

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Notes

  1. https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---11-march-2020, last accessed 10 June 2022.

  2. Namely, Animal Behavior and Cognition; Biochemistry; Bioengineering; Bioinformatics; Biophysics; Cancer Biology; Cell Biology; Clinical Trials; Developmental Biology; Ecology; Epidemiology; Evolutionary Biology; Genetics; Genomics; Immunology; Microbiology; Molecular Biology; Neuroscience; Paleontology; Pathology; Pharmacology and Toxicology; Physiology; Plant Biology; Scientific Communication and Education; Synthetic Biology; Systems Biology; Zoology.

  3. For a brief review of literature on the use of bioRxiv and preprint repositories in general as data sources, see Abramo, D’Angelo and Mele (2022).

  4. https://www.bioRxiv.org/about-bioRxiv

  5. Authors may deposit revised versions of articles up to their formal acceptance by a journal.

  6. Namely, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States.

  7. Note that, co-authorship by e.g. Italian and French researchers are considered as international collaborations, even though they are both part of the EC.

  8. Data on the research staff of bio-related departments at universities in the 14 surveyed countries are not available. However they can be proxied through output data. Specifically, we used the number of preprints deposited by each university as a proxy of the size of its bio-related research staff.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Studies in Research Evaluation, Institute for System Analysis and Computer Science (IASI-CNR), National Research Council of Italy, Rome, Italy

    Giovanni Abramo, Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo & Flavia Di Costa

  2. Department of Engineering and Management, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Rome, Italy

    Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo

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  1. Giovanni Abramo
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  2. Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo
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  3. Flavia Di Costa
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Correspondence to Giovanni Abramo.

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Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C.A. & Di Costa, F. How the Covid-19 crisis shaped research collaboration behaviour. Scientometrics 127, 5053–5071 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04450-2

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