Abstract
The number of internationally co-authored articles have significantly increased in recent years and now receive more citations than domestic works. Abramo et al. (Scientometrics 86:629–643, 2011b) investigated scholars in Italian universities and found a positive correlation between their research performance and degree of internationalization. This study uses a data set in chemistry to examine the robustness of the results presented by Abramo et al. (Scientometrics 86:629–643, 2011b) and the relationship between international collaboration and mobility among researchers. The results confirmed the robustness of the previous study and raised the possibility that the higher citation rate of international papers is not solely explained by the higher performance of researchers. Therefore, international research collaboration seems to exert some kind of “bonus” effect because of internationalization. The results also indicate that researchers who collaborate internationally accumulate science and technology human capital through collaboration. A positive relationship between the international mobility of researchers and their performance is also shown although the direction of the cause and effect is not yet clear.
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Notes
Schmoch and Schubert (2008) concluded that international co-authorship could not be an indicator of the quality of scientific activities because they do not know how these variables are correlated. Therefore, we have to acknowledge that higher citation rates in international co-authorship are interpreted as indicators of higher quality but with limitations. We use the term “citation” in most cases instead of “quality”; however, in some instances we retained “quality” as this was a term used by Abramo et al. (2011b).
We used author information that only appears in the reprinted authors’ column because only in recent years did the names in the author column uniquely correspond with countries.
Six authors affiliated with only one institute. Most researchers published almost all papers in only one institute.
OECD member countries include the following, which became members before 1990: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, Japan, Finland, Australia, and New Zealand.
h-index reflects both the number of papers and citations per publication. By definition, an author with the index X has published at least X papers, each of which has been cited at least X times. In contrast, π-index is equal to one hundredth of the number of citations obtained by the most frequently cited papers (Vinkler 2011).
The scale effect of countries should be considered. For instance, smaller countries in terms of population have higher rates of internationally co-authored papers compared with more populated countries (Kato and Chayama 2010).
These Asian countries have large populations, and their mother tongue is not English; therefore, they might publish papers in domestic journals using their own languages. However, considering that almost 80 % of Japanese doctoral dissertations in physics are written in English but only 25 % in engineering (Muraoka et al. 2003), papers in chemistry are usually published in English even for domestic papers. This could be included in our data.
Concerning the size effect, other explanations such as geography or the development stage of the scientific community could explain these phenomena.
Age differences should be noted between the two groups; for instance, researchers without international mobility were younger and might not have had enough time to stay in foreign countries at that point in his/her career; however, this type of information was not available in our data set.
Figure 1 targets all researchers in data and shows that there is little difference between the average citation rate of domestic and international papers; however, we target only researchers who authored both international and domestic papers here in research question 2.
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This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) (22500238).
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Kato, M., Ando, A. The relationship between research performance and international collaboration in chemistry. Scientometrics 97, 535–553 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1011-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1011-y