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National ties of international scientific collaboration and researcher mobility found in Nature and Science

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Abstract

In recent decades, internationalization of research activities has increased, as demonstrated by the phenomena of international scientific collaboration and international mobility of researchers. This paper investigates whether the international scientific collaboration is explained by researchers’ motivation as well as their international migration. Using metadata from papers published in Nature and Science from 1989 to 2009, count data estimation was conducted. The results illustrate those researchers’ international migration and motivation, shown by both synergy and difference effects between countries, explain international collaboration. This implies that international co-authorship in recent decades has been based on researchers’ motivation as well as their networking. The positive result for synergy effects also means that pairs of countries with rich research environments tended to have more international collaboration, which may lead to the convergence of qualified research output in advanced scientific countries. Our findings also support the conclusion that researchers move to countries with better research environments, but networks created through international collaboration are not a factor in international migration. The relationship between international mobility and collaboration is confirmed as going in one direction, from mobility to collaboration.

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Notes

  1. Overall research activities, including domestic ones, are increasingly collaborative: research teams are becoming larger and are composed of scientists from different institutions and different countries (Wuchty et al. 2007). The reason for the increase in internationally co-authored papers could be partially related to the increase in collaboration in all research activities.

  2. Although motivation has remained stable at the micro level, it may have increased at the macro level due to the increase of other related factors such as the number of researchers or that of mobile researchers.

  3. A possible reason for this lack of attention could be a tendency to take researchers’ intrinsic motivation for granted, because researchers possess distinctive personalities, possibly including significantly higher levels of intrinsic motivation compared with the general population (Lounsbury et al. 2012).

  4. Statistically the forms of variables can be determined through Box-Cox test. Regarding the selection of the functional forms in this paper, please see Footnote 7.

  5. Variable ICPaper (i,j,t) is the same as ICPaper (j,i,t) because it shows the number of internationally co-authored papers between Country i and Country j. Other variables are also similar.

  6. The names in the Reprint Address column are expressed as the family name and the initial of the first name. This introduces the possibility of mistaking two or more different people as the same person. Although we randomly checked some authors by research fields and institutions listed in the biography or CV and found no identification errors, the possibility of contamination still remains.

  7. First, we conducted a Box–Cox transform assuming (a) logarithm for both sides of the model and (b) a linear (left hand side)—log (right hand side) model. The results are indeterminate as both hypotheses are not supported, and we calculated both models to choose the one which demonstrated the better fitness.

  8. We have tried Salton’s measure to see the impact of international collaboration strength on each country, because some previous studies, including Choi (2012) and Glänzel (2001), have used the measure. The measure is defined as the number of joint publications divided by the square root of the product of the total number of publications for each country (Glänzel and Schuberet 2004). The estimation was found however, insignificance of any coefficients of dependent variables, which is contradictory for the result of current count data model.

  9. However, a high number of researchers does not necessarily mean the possibility to meet the best suitable research partners, as evidenced by the ambiguous relationship between performance and number of researchers. The relationship between quantity and proportion of internationally coauthored papers in a country should be considered carefully. For instance, the countries with many colleagues have little motivation to collaborate internationally; therefore, the proportion of internationally coauthored papers will be low. However, the overall number of internationally coauthored papers will increase based on the motivation of coauthors who have stayed in their own country and have few colleagues.

  10. Countries’ research capacity could also affect international collaboration, because large countries have diverse and complete research activities by themselves.

  11. For instance, if a researcher staying in country A migrates to country B, his/her paper, formerly a collaboration with country B, becomes domestic paper, and the one with country A becomes an international paper. This might describe the situation in the United States, which has a relatively low international co-authorship rate and a higher level of foreign-born researchers.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to an anonymous referee for the insightful comments on an earlier draft. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP 22500238.

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Correspondence to Maki Kato.

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Kato, M., Ando, A. National ties of international scientific collaboration and researcher mobility found in Nature and Science . Scientometrics 110, 673–694 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2183-z

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