International collaboration is being heralded as the hallmark of contemporary scientific production. Yet little quantitative evidence has portrayed the landscape and trends of such collaboration. To this end, 14,000,000 documents indexed in Thomson Reuters's Web of Science (WoS) were studied to provide a state-of-the-art description of scientific collaborations across the world. The results indicate that the number of authors in the largest research teams have not significantly grown during the past decade; however, the number of smaller research teams has seen significant increases in growth. In terms of composition, the largest teams have become more diverse than the latter teams and tend more toward interinstitutional and international collaboration. Investigating the size of teams showed large variation between fields. Mapping scientific cooperation at the country level reveals that Western countries situated at the core of the map are extensively cooperating with each other. High-impact institutions are significantly more collaborative than others. This work should inform policy makers, administrators, and those interested in the progression of scientific collaboration.

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This paper examines the abstracts of the articles of the five most cited institutions in the world to determine their text reading level. Around 260,000 articles were analysed during 2000-2009 and the Flesch reading ease (RE) formula was applied to calculate the difficulty level of the abstracts according to the readability scores. The present study tries to: determine the abstracts reading level; discover the difference in the abstracts reading level among various disciplines; check the changes in the reading level of the abstracts during the examined years; test the correlation between the readability of the abstracts and their scientific impact. The results revealed that the texts of the abstracts are very difficult to read. Although this fact is true for all disciplines, disciplines can be divided into two groups based on their reading level, with some clearly less readable than others. No considerable change was observed in the readability scores of the abstracts over the examined years. Although the results of this research indicate that academics always write their abstracts in a difficult manner, these findings may result from the limitations in the readability formulas. Some researchers argue that these formulas ignore the readers' prior knowledge, interest and motivation and, based on the findings, it is clear that academics do tolerate such apparently difficult texts (RE score).

This study examines the extent of concentration in the journal publishing industry. A number of aspects are considered: publishers, journal impacts, countries, and languages. For journals indexed in JCR from 1997 to 2009, just 0.2% of publishers produce 50% of journals and articles, and 0.3% of publishers account for the top 50% of citations, impact factors and immediacy indices. More than a half of publishers in JCR are from four countries: USA, UK, Germany and Japan. In addition, more than a half of journals come from the USA and UK. Examining the publishers' interactions in terms of buying and selling journals shows the extent of change by acquisition, and the acquisition links between publishers. The findings confirm that the international market of journal publishing is essentially dominated by a few publishers.