Measuring international research collaboration of peripheral countries: Taking the context into consideration

Summary

This paper investigates the research collaboration of Korean physicist (1977-2000), using co-authorship method. After discussing on the co-authorship method, this paper suggests the necessity of taking contexts of research collaboration into consideration, especially for scientifically “peripheral”countries. The analysis shows an interesting finding with respect to the international collaboration: the proportion of internationally collaborated papers did not increase substantially during the last two decades, which is against the results of other studies. An analysis of the number of participating countries shows that multilateral collaboration has increased considerably in the last 20 years, though the proportion of international research collaboration remains stable. The results of this study give an indirect support to the transformation of research collaboration from rather 'asymmetrical' from 'symmetrical' one.