Evolution and convergence of the patterns of international scientific collaboration

Abstract

International research collaboration plays an important role in the social construction and evolution of science. Studies of science increasingly analyze international collaboration across multiple organizations for its impetus in improving research quality, advancing efficiency of the scientific production, and fostering breakthroughs in a shorter time. However, long-run patterns of international research collaboration across scientific fields and their structural changes over time are hardly known. Here we show the convergence of international scientific collaboration across research fields over time. Our study uses a dataset by the National Science Foundation and computes the fraction of papers that have international institutional coauthorships for various fields of science. We compare our results with pioneering studies carried out in the 1970s and 1990s by applying a standardization method that transforms all fractions of internationally coauthored papers into a comparable framework. We find, over 1973–2012, that the evolution of collaboration patterns across scientific disciplines seems to generate a convergence between applied and basic sciences. We also show that the general architecture of international scientific collaboration, based on the ranking of fractions of international coauthorships for different scientific fields per year, has tended to be unchanged over time, at least until now. Overall, this study shows, to our knowledge for the first time, the evolution of the patterns of international scientific collaboration starting from initial results described by literature in the 1970s and 1990s. We find a convergence of these long-run collaboration patterns between the applied and basic sciences. This convergence might be one of contributing factors that supports the evolution of modern scientific fields.

The changing nature of collaboration in tropical ecology and conservation

“…Our findings are consistent with those of other studies (Coccia & Wang , Logan , Barlow et al . ) that have observed increases in the number of authors per article.…”

“…It may also be due to the inclusion of previously uncredited technicians and assistants (Mammides et al . ), increased scientific specialization among scientists (Kostoff , Gould ), and the labor‐intensive work that goes into conducting ecological studies (Newman , Coccia & Wang ). Alternatively, the increase in the number of authors per article may simply reflect changing criteria by journal editors and reviewers for what is considered a contribution that merits author attribution (Weltzin et al .…”

“…In recent years, there has been an increase in the frequency of multiauthored publications in several scientific disciplines, including ecology, suggesting greater collaboration among scientists (Coccia & Wang , Barlow et al . ).…”

Factors determining the diffusion of COVID-19 and suggested strategy to prevent future accelerated viral infectivity similar to COVID

“…In addition, high surveillance and proper biosafety procedures in public and private institutes of virology that study viruses and new viruses to avoid that may be accidentally spread in surrounding environments with damages for population and vegetation. In this context, international collaboration among scientists is basic to address these risks and support decisions of policymakers to prevent future pandemic that creates huge socioeconomic issues Journal Pre-proof worldwide (cf., Coccia and Wang, 2016) 4 . In fact, following the COVID-19 outbreak, The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) points out that the global economy may contract of about by 2.5% and Italy by -7% of real GDP growth % in 2020 (EIU, 2020).…”

Using Environmental DNA to Improve Species Distribution Models for Freshwater Invaders

“…Therefore, there are possibilities from the SDMs to deal with the potential bias arising from using eDNA as a sampling technique which encourage its use despite current relative limitations. The ability to cope with the limitations and strength of the combination of these distinct research fields will benefit from the collaboration between molecular ecologists and modelers contributing to the evolution of two scientific disciplines (Coccia and Wang, 2016). Other disciplines apart from invasion ecology (e.g., biogeography or spatial ecology) might also benefit from future development of molecular ecology tools as a sampling technique.…”