This paper examines the structure of scientific collaborations in a large European metropolitan area. It aims to identify strategic coalitions among organizations in Berlin as a specific case with high institutional and sectoral diversity. By adopting a global, regional and organization based approach we provide a quantitative, exploratory and macro view of this diversity. We use publications data with at least one organization located in Berlin from 1996-2017. We further investigate four members of the Berlin University Alliance (BUA) through their self-represented research profiles comparing it with empirical results of OECD disciplines. Using a bipartite network modeling framework, we are able to move beyond the uncontested trend towards team science and increasing internationalization. Our results show that BUA members shape the structure of scientific collaborations in the region. However, they are not collaborating cohesively in all disciplines. Larger divides exist in some disciplines e.g., Agricultural Sciences and Humanities. Only Medical and Health Sciences have cohesive intraregional collaborations which signals the success of regional cooperation established in 2003. We explain possible underlying factors shaping the observed trends and sectoral and intra-regional groupings. A major methodological contribution of this paper is evaluating coverage and accuracy of different organization name disambiguation techniques.
The shift from 'trust-based funding' to 'performance-based funding' is one of the factors that has forced institutions to strive for continuous improvement of performance. Several studies have established the importance of collaboration in enhancing the performance of paired institutions. However, identification of suitable institutions for collaboration is sometimes difficult and therefore institutional collaboration recommendation systems can be vital. Currently, there are no well-developed institutional collaboration recommendation systems. In order to bridge this gap, we design a framework…
Two Decades of Scientific Misconduct in India: Retraction Reasons and Journal Quality among Inter-country and Intra-country Institutional Collaboration
This paper investigates the role of homophily and focus constraint in shaping collaborative scientific research. First, homophily structures collaboration when scientists adhere to a norm of exclusivity in selecting similar partners at a higher rate than dissimilar ones. Two dimensions on which similarity between scientists can be assessed are their research specialties and status positions. Second, focus constraint shapes collaboration when connections among scientists depend on opportunities for social contact. Constraint comes in two forms, depending on whether it originates in institutiona…
Collaborations are an integral part of scientific research and publishing. In the past, access to large-scale corpora has limited the ways in which questions about collaborations could be investigated. However, with improvements in data/metadata quality and access, it is possible to explore the idea of research collaboration in ways beyond the traditional definition of multiple authorship. In this paper, we examine scientific works through three different lenses of collaboration: across multiple authors, multiple institutions, and multiple departments. We believe this to be a first look at mul…
This article maps Library and Information Science (LIS) research in Indian universities. As the two prominent citation databases, Web of Science and Scopus have very limited coverage of Indian LIS journals, the publications generated by the library and science departments of about 114 selected Indian universities and the two national institutions of importance in LIS research were extracted from Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA). The relevant publication records were analyzed using scientometrics and Social Network Analysis (SNA) tools. The study traces the growth of …
This article examines the relationship between acquaintanceship and coauthorship patterns in a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, geographically distributed research center. Two social networks are constructed and compared: a network of coauthorship, representing how researchers write articles with one another, and a network of acquaintanceship, representing how those researchers know each other on a personal level, based on their responses to an online survey. Statistical analyses of the topology and community structure of these networks point to the importance of small-scale, local, pe…
Accurate measurement of institutional research productivity should account for the real contribution of the research staff to the output produced in collaboration with other organizations. In the framework of bibliometric measurement, this implies accounting for both the number of co-authors and each individual's real contribution to scientific publications. Common practice in the life sciences is to indicate such contribution through the order of author names in the byline. In this work, we measure the distortion introduced to university-level bibliometric productivity rankings when the numbe…
The study, based on the Web of Science, analyses 758 articles published from 2000 to 2014. Our analysis includes the publications' output, authorship, institutional and country patterns of production, citations and collaboration. A Social Network Analysis was conducted to identify primary groups of researchers and institutions and the collaboration between countries. The study reveals that 1097 authors and 453 Institutions have contributed to the journal. The collaboration index has increased progressively, and the average degree of collaboration during the study period was 1.98. The majority …
This paper provides the first historical analysis of the relationship between collaboration and scientific impact, using three indicators of collaboration (number of authors, number of addresses, and number of countries) and including articles published between 1900 and 2011. The results demonstrate that an increase in the number of authors leads to an increase in impact--from the beginning of the last century onwards--and that this is not simply due to self-citations. A similar trend is also observed for the number of addresses and number of countries represented in the byline of an article. …
Current science and technology has produced more and more publically accessible scientific data. However, little is known about how the open data trend impacts a scientific community, specifically in terms of its collaboration behaviors. This paper aims to enhance our understanding of the dynamics of scientific collaboration in the open data eScience environment via a case study of co-author networks of an active and highly cited open data project, called Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We visualized the co-authoring networks and measured their properties over time at three levels: author, instituti…
Several studies exist which use scientific literature for comparing scientific activities (e.g., productivity, and collaboration). In this study, using co-authorship data over the last 40 years, we present the evolutionary dynamics of multi level (i.e., individual, institutional and national) collaboration networks for exploring the emergence of collaborations in the research field of "steel structures". The collaboration network of scientists in the field has been analyzed using author affiliations extracted from Scopus between 1970 and 2009. We have studied collaboration distribution network…
The incidence of extramural collaboration in academic research activities is increasing as a result of various factors. These factors include policy measures aimed at fostering partnership and networking among the various components of the research system, policies which are in turn justified by the idea that knowledge sharing could increase the effectiveness of the system. Over the last two decades, the scientific community has also stepped up activities to assess the actual impact of collaboration intensity on the performance of research systems. This study draws on a number of empirical ana…
This paper analyzes the evolution of coauthorship in Spain in the social sciences between 2000 and 2013. The goal is to explore to which extent limitations on the number of coauthors established by Spanish national evaluation agencies are justified. The analysis of 11681 papers authored by researchers affiliated to Spanish institutions in 20 subject categories of the social sciences reveals that there is no inflation in the number of authors, team size is similar to that found in foreign papers and the number of authors is dependent on international and institutional collaboration. With the ex…
In this research, we examine the hypothesis that gender disparities in international research collaboration differ by collaboration intensity, academic position, age, and academic discipline. The following are the major findings: (1) while female scientists exhibit a higher rate of general, national, and institutional collaboration, male scientists exhibit a higher rate of international collaboration, a finding critically important in explaining gender disparities in impact, productivity, and access to large grants. (2) An aggregated picture of gender disparities hides a more nuanced cross-dis…
Scientists collaborate through intricate networks, which impact the quality and scope of their research. At the same time, funding and institutional arrangements, as well as scientific and political cultures, affect the structure of collaboration networks. Since such arrangements and cultures differ across regions in the world in systematic ways, we surmise that collaboration networks and impact should also differ systematically across regions. To test this, we compare the structure of collaboration networks among prominent researchers in North America and Europe. We find that prominent resear…
What Large-Scale Publication and Citation Data Tell Us About International Research Collaboration in Europe: Changing National Patterns in Global Contexts
Many investigations of scientific collaboration are based on statistical analyses of large networks constructed from bibliographic repositories. These investigations often rely on a wealth of bibliographic data, but very little or no other information about the individuals in the network, and thus, fail to illustrate the broader social and academic landscape in which collaboration takes place. In this article, we perform an in-depth longitudinal analysis of a relatively small network of scientific collaboration (N = 291) constructed from the bibliographic record of a research center involved i…
The growing complexity of challenges involved in scientific progress demands ever more frequent application of competencies and knowledge from different scientific fields. The present work analyzes the degree of collaboration among scientists from different disciplines in order to identify the most frequent "combinations of knowledge" in research activity. The methodology adopts an innovative bibliometric approach based on the disciplinary affiliation of publication co-authors. The field of observation includes all publications (173,134) indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-E) f…
Interdisciplinary collaborations now sweep most fields of the natural and life sciences, necessary to tackle the world's most challenging problems. Yet, the scientific enterprise continues to be dominated by old stereotypes: Interdisciplinary science is less likely to receive funding and is discriminated at institutional levels. Ample solutions for funders, institutions and publishers have been suggested, but the most visible form of scientific credit has so far been ignored: How interdisciplinary is our award system? To address this question, we explore interdisciplinarity in the most prestig…
A well established agenda on the research output, impact, and structure of global scientific elites such as Nobel Prize laureates has generated interest in the scientific elites from developing countries. This study deploys science mapping techniques to provide a comprehensive analysis of the output, impact, and structure of the Colombian scientific elite, i.e., researchers awarded with the Alejandro Angel Escobar Foundation National Prize 1990 2020, known locally as the Colombian Nobel. Findings showed that the Colombian scientific elite has a broader agenda than indexing titles in internatio…
