Exploring the changing geographical pattern of international scientific collaborations through the prism of cities

Science is becoming increasingly international in terms of breaking down walls in its pursuit of high impact. Despite geographical location and distance still being major barriers for scientific collaboration, little is known about whether high-impact collaborations are similarly constrained by geog...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2020-11, Vol.15 (11), p.e0242468-e0242468
Main Authors: Csomós, György, Vida, Zsófia Viktória, Lengyel, Balázs
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bibliometrics
Breaking down
Cities
Cities - statistics & numerical data
Co authorship
Collaboration
Cooperation
Cooperative Behavior
Data collection
Decay
Earth Sciences
Engineering and Technology
European Union
Forecasts and trends
Geographical distribution
Geographical locations
Geography
Humans
Influence
Interdisciplinary Research - trends
International
International aspects
International Cooperation
Intersectoral Collaboration
Leadership
People and places
Physical Sciences
Publication output
Research - trends
Research and Analysis Methods
Research and development partnerships
Scientific cooperation
Scientometrics
Social Behavior
Social Sciences
Software
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Science is becoming increasingly international in terms of breaking down walls in its pursuit of high impact. Despite geographical location and distance still being major barriers for scientific collaboration, little is known about whether high-impact collaborations are similarly constrained by geography compared to collaborations of average impact. To address this question, we analyze Web of Science (WoS) data on international collaboration between global leader cities in science production. We report an increasing intensity of international city-city collaboration and find that average distance of collaboration of the strongest connections has slightly increased, but distance decay has remained stable over the last three decades. However, high-impact collaborations span large distances by following similar distance decay. This finding suggests that a larger geographical reach of research collaboration should be aimed for to support high-impact science. The creation of the European Research Area (ERA) represents an effective action that has deepened intracontinental research collaborations and the position of the European Union (EU) in global science. Yet, our results provide new evidence that global scientific leaders are not sufficiently collaborative in carrying out their big science projects.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0242468