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Regional research and foreign collaboration

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Abstract

Motivated by the merging of four Swedish counties to a larger administrative and political unit with increased responsibilities, a comprehensive study of regional–foreign research collaboration was carried out. Various multivariate methods were applied for the depiction of collaborative networks of various compositions and at various levels of aggregation. Other aspects investigated concerned the influence of institutions and countries on regional–foreign collaboration and the relation between collaboration and research fields. Findings showed that foreign research collaboration was concentrated to three major regional institutions, each with a characteristic collaborative context. The influence of domestic collaboration was notable with regard to medical research while collaboration within the field of physics and astronomy was characteristic for pure regional–foreign collaboration, which was the dominating type of research collaboration throughout the period of observation (1998–2006).

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Notes

  1. The adjusted CWTS hierarchical field classification system is available at the author’s Website (Jarneving 2009).

  2. For instance the Jaccard index or Salton’s cosine formula which both normalize for size.

  3. A value near zero is arrived at if one or both of u ik and v jk is near zero on dimension k.

  4. The selection of k dimensions is done in relation to the distribution of inertia (variation) so that k dimensions cover most of it.

  5. The Gini index is the Gini coefficient expressed as a percentage.

  6. I.e. a unique occurrence of an institutional address in a publication equals one publication produced by the same institution.

  7. Nine co-occurrences—corresponding to one annual paper on the average during the period of observation—were applied as a preliminary cut off point and lower frequencies regarded random. In this distribution, the Gini Index was 22%.

  8. Some of the more interesting findings are presented here, but for a detailed study of the map, complementary data is available at the author’s Website (Jarneving 2009).

  9. As a matter of clarity, we denote the total network made up by all collaborative associations between all types of institutions (regional, domestic, foreign) the “regional-foreign” network.

  10. The term”unique” is used to mark that the co-occurrence frequency of two institutions is based on the number of publications in which two institutions occurred in the same address field—not the factual occurrence of their institutional addresses. The threshold of 30 corresponds to a level above the 99th percentile in the total distribution of collaboration links.

  11. Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) is the largest public research organisation in Spain whereas European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is the largest particle physics laboratory of the world. Russian Academy of Sciences collects a large number of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation.

  12. Complementary data is available at the author’s Website (Jarneving 2009).

  13. It should be noted that ambiguity is introduced when an alphabetical order is applied as it may either reflect a custom or that all contributions are equal.

  14. The points in the plot are scaled so that row or column points with large marginal frequencies do not dominate.

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  1. Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Boras, Boras, Sweden

    Bo Jarneving

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Correspondence to Bo Jarneving.

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Jarneving, B. Regional research and foreign collaboration. Scientometrics 83, 295–320 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0064-4

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