Analysis of scientific cooperation at the international and intercontinental level

Abstract

The studies of international scientific cooperation have been present in the literature since the early 1990s. However, much less is known about this cooperation at the intercontinental level. Very recently Krawczyk and Malarz (Chaos 33(11):111102, 2023), showed that the rank-based probability distribution of the sequences of ‘continents (number of countries)’ in the authors’ affiliations shows a clear power law with an exponent close to 1.9. In this paper, we focus on the analysis of almost 14 million papers. Based on the affiliations of their authors, we created lists of sequences ‘continent (number of countries)’—at the intercontinental level—and ‘country (number of authors)’ sequences—at the international level—and analysed them in terms of their frequency. In contrast to the intercontinental level, the rank-based probability distribution of the ‘country (number of authors)’ sequences in the authors’ affiliations reveals a broken power law distribution.