A half-century of global collaboration in science and the 'Shrinking World'

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Okamura, Keisuke
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2022
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author Okamura, Keisuke
author_facet Okamura, Keisuke
contents Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic shift in the cross-border collaboration mode of researchers, with countries increasingly cooperating and competing with one another. It is crucial for leaders in academia and policy to understand the full extent of international research collaboration, their country's position within it, and its evolution over time. However, evidence for such world-scale dynamism is still scarce. This paper provides unique evidence of how international collaboration clusters have formed and evolved over the past 50 years across various scientific publications, using data from OpenAlex, a large-scale Open Bibliometrics platform launched in 2022. We first examine how the global presence of top-tier countries has changed in 15 natural science disciplines over time, as measured by publication volumes and international collaboration rates. Notably, we observe that the US and China have been rapidly moving closer together for decades but began moving apart after 2019. We then perform a hierarchical clustering to analyse and visualise the international collaboration clusters for each discipline and period. Finally, we provide quantitative evidence of a `Shrinking World' of research collaboration at a global scale over the past half-century. Our results provide valuable insights into the big picture of past, present and future international collaboration.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2211_04429
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A half-century of global collaboration in science and the 'Shrinking World'
Okamura, Keisuke
Digital Libraries
Computers and Society
Social and Information Networks
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Physics and Society
Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic shift in the cross-border collaboration mode of researchers, with countries increasingly cooperating and competing with one another. It is crucial for leaders in academia and policy to understand the full extent of international research collaboration, their country's position within it, and its evolution over time. However, evidence for such world-scale dynamism is still scarce. This paper provides unique evidence of how international collaboration clusters have formed and evolved over the past 50 years across various scientific publications, using data from OpenAlex, a large-scale Open Bibliometrics platform launched in 2022. We first examine how the global presence of top-tier countries has changed in 15 natural science disciplines over time, as measured by publication volumes and international collaboration rates. Notably, we observe that the US and China have been rapidly moving closer together for decades but began moving apart after 2019. We then perform a hierarchical clustering to analyse and visualise the international collaboration clusters for each discipline and period. Finally, we provide quantitative evidence of a `Shrinking World' of research collaboration at a global scale over the past half-century. Our results provide valuable insights into the big picture of past, present and future international collaboration.
title A half-century of global collaboration in science and the 'Shrinking World'
topic Digital Libraries
Computers and Society
Social and Information Networks
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Physics and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.04429