Openness and Impact of Leading Scientific Countries

The rapid rise of international collaboration over the past three decades, demonstrated in coauthorship of scientific articles, raises the question of whether countries benefit from cooperative science and how this might be measured. We develop and compare measures to ask this question. For all source publications in 2013, we obtained from Elsevier national-level full and fractional paper counts as well as accompanying field-weighted citation counts. Then we collected information from Elsevier on the percent of all internationally coauthored papers for each country, as well as Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) measures of the international mobility of the scientific workforce in 2013, and conducted a principle component analysis that produced an openness index. We added data from the OECD on government budget allocation on research and development (GBARD) for 2011 to tie in the public spending that contributed to the 2013 output. We found that openness among advanced science systems is strongly correlated with impact—the more internationally engaged a nation is in terms of coauthorships and researcher mobility, the higher the impact of scientific work. The results have important implications for policy making around investment, as well as the flows of students, researchers, and technical workers

Democratic governance and global science: A longitudinal analysis of the international research collaboration network.

The democracy-science relationship has traditionally been examined through philosophical conjecture and country case studies. There remains limited global-scale empirical research on the topic. This study explores country-level factors related to the dynamics of the global research collaboration network, focusing on structural associations between democratic governance and the strength of international research collaboration ties. This study combines longitudinal data on 170 countries between 2008 and 2017 from the Varieties of Democracy Institute, World Bank Indicators, Scopus, and Web of Science bibliometric data. Methods include descriptive network analysis, temporal exponential random graph models (TERGM), and valued exponential random graph models (VERGM). The results suggest significant positive effects of democratic governance on the formation and strength of international research collaboration ties and homophily between countries with similar levels of democratic governance. The results also show the importance of exogenous factors, such as GDP, population size, and geographical distance, as well as endogenous network factors, including preferential attachment and transitivity

Democratic Governance and International Research Collaboration: A Longitudinal Analysis of the Global Science Network

The democracy-science relationship has traditionally been examined through philosophical conjecture and single country case studies. There remains limited global scale empirical research on the topic. This study explores country level factors that affect dynamics of the global scientific research collaboration network, focusing on structural effects of democratic governance on the formation, persistence, and strength of international research collaboration ties. This study combines longitudinal data between 2008 and 2017 from the Varieties of Democracy Institute, World Bank Indicators, Scopus, and Web of Science bibliometric data. Methods of analysis include temporal and weighted exponential random graph models. The results suggest positive significant effects of both democratic governance on international research collaboration and homophily between countries with similar levels of democratic governance. Finally, the results show the effects of exogenous economic, population, and geo-political factors, as well as endogenous network effects including preferential attachment and transitivity

Openness and Impact of Leading Scientific Countries

The rapid rise of international collaboration over the past three decades, demonstrated in coauthorship of scientific articles, raises the question of whether countries benefit from cooperative science and how this might be measured. We develop and compare measures to ask this question. For all source publications in 2013, we obtained from Elsevier national-level full and fractional paper counts as well as accompanying field-weighted citation counts. Then we collected information from Elsevier on the percent of all internationally coauthored papers for each country, as well as Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) measures of the international mobility of the scientific workforce in 2013, and conducted a principle component analysis that produced an openness index. We added data from the OECD on government budget allocation on research and development (GBARD) for 2011 to tie in the public spending that contributed to the 2013 output. We found that openness is strongly correlated with impact—the more open a nation is to international engagement, the higher the impact of scientific work. The results have important implications for policy making around investment, as well as the flows of students, researchers, and technical workers.JRC.B.7-Knowledge for Finance, Innovation and Growt