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Core-periphery, new clusters, or rising stars?: international scientific collaboration among ‘advanced’ countries in the era of globalization

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Abstract

Assuming the OECD member states as ‘advanced’ nations equipped with basic scientific capacities, the present research addresses the network configuration of these countries in international scientific collaboration and the transformation of this network along with globalization. The result suggests that geographical, linguistic, and economic affinities did not have a meaningful impact on the formation of co-authorship network between ‘advanced’ nations, different from previous research results which claimed their importance on international cooperation. Globalization facilitated by the development of information and transportation technologies was found to influence the co-authorship link between countries, but not to accelerate centralization of the network in the past 15 years. Though the core-periphery pattern still persists, new rising stars, which are Korea and Turkey, have emerged in the co-authorship network among ‘advanced’ nations. These two countries, having a rapid increase in the share of degree centrality from 1995 to 2010, had strategic financial support from the government which stimulated the collaboration between universities and industries and emphasized the development of science and engineering fields.

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Notes

  1. Four new OECD member states—Chile, Estonia, Israel, and Slovenia—are not included in the analysis, since they are not comparable to other pre-existing members for the comparison between 1995 and 2010. In addition to the four, countries which joined OECD after 1995 were Hungary, Korea, and Poland, but they are included in the analysis, assuming 1-year difference is not influential in changing the nation’s basic scientific capacity. They all became OECD members in 1996.

  2. This Web site, a part of Pearson Education Company, provides information about the official language of each country and other languages spoken. Data used for this study are retrieved from “Languages Spoken in Each Country of the World” on the Web site of Infoplease: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0855611.html.

  3. Please refer to the following Web page for details: http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=558.

  4. Detailed information about the HHI can be found in the following Web site of the Department of Justice, http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/testimony/hhi.htm.

  5. For detailed explanation about Salton’s measure, please refer to Glanzel and Schubert (2005, p. 266) and Zitt et al. (2000, p. 631).

  6. The Affinity Index is also illustrated in Zitt et al. (2000, p. 631).

  7. According to Borgatti et al. (1999), the fitness is calculated by the correlation between the permuted data matrix and an ideal structure matrix consisting of ones in the core block interactions and zeros in the peripheral block interactions.

  8. The number of patent applications of 1995 and 2008 is filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty based on the priority year (OECD 2010c).

  9. Gross expenditure on R & D per capita is in U.S. dollar at current prices and current PPPs (OECD 2010c). R&D expenditure of 2008 was the latest data which had the least missing values.

  10. All indexes are covered: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Science (CPCI-S), and Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Social Science & Humanities (CPCI-SSH). The document type is confined to articles, excluding reviews, excerpts, fictions, and letters, but including all languages. .

  11. Please refer to Table 6.

  12. The source of the data is from the Web site of BK21 NURI Committee: http://bnc.krf.or.kr/home/eng/bk21/achievement.jsp.

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Correspondence to Sujin Choi.

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Choi, S. Core-periphery, new clusters, or rising stars?: international scientific collaboration among ‘advanced’ countries in the era of globalization. Scientometrics 90, 25–41 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0509-4

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