Global trends in international research collaboration, 1980-2021

Purpose:The aim of this study is to analyze the evolution of international research collaboration from 1980 to 2021.The study examines the main global patterns as well as those specific to individual countries,country groups,and different areas of research.Design/methodology/approach:The study is based on the Web of Science Core collection database.More than 50 million publications are analyzed using co-authorship data.International collaboration is defined as publications having authors affiliated with institutions located in more than one country.Findings:At the global level,the share of publications representing international collaboration has gradually increased from 4.7%in 1980 to 25.7%in 2021.The proportion of such publications within each country is higher and,in 2021,varied from less than 30%to more than 90%.There are notable disparities in the temporal trends,indicating that the process of internationalization has impacted countries in different ways.Several factors such as country size,income level,and geopolitics may explain the variance.Research limitations:Not all international research collaboration results in joint co-authored scientific publications.International co-authorship is a partial indicator of such collaboration.Another limitation is that the applied full counting method does not take into account the number of authors representing in each country in the publication.Practical implications:The study provides global averages,indicators,and concepts that can provide a useful framework of reference for further comparative studies of international research collaboration.Originality/value:Long-term macro-level studies of international collaboration are rare,and as a novelty,this study includes an analysis by the World Bank’s division of countries into four income groups.

A Criteria-based Assessment of the Coverage of Scopus and Web of Science

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to assess the coverage of the scientific literature in Scopus and Web of Science from the perspective of research evaluation.Design/methodology/approach: The academic communities of Norway have agreed on certain criteria for what should be included as original research publications in research evaluation and funding contexts. These criteria have been applied since 2004 in a comprehensive bibliographic database called the Norwegian Science Index(NSI). The relative coverages of Scopus and Web of Science are compared with regard to publication type, field of research and language.Findings: Our results show that Scopus covers 72 percent of the total Norwegian scientific and scholarly publication output in 2015 and 2016, while the corresponding figure for Web of Science Core Collection is 69 percent. The coverages are most comprehensive in medicine and health(89 and 87 percent) and in the natural sciences and technology(85 and 84 percent). The social sciences(48 percent in Scopus and 40 percent in Web of Science Core Collection) and particularly the humanities(27 and 23 percent) are much less covered in the two international data sources. Research limitation: Comparing with data from only one country is a limitation of the study, but the criteria used to define a country's scientific output as well as the identification of patterns of field-dependent partial representations in Scopus and Web of Science should be recognizable and useful also for other countries. Originality/value: The novelty of this study is the criteria-based approach to studying coverage problems in the two data sources.

Lone Geniuses or One among Many?An Explorative Study of Contemporary Highly Cited Researchers

Purpose:The ranking lists of highly cited researchers receive much public attention.In common interpretations,highly cited researchers are perceived to have made extraordinary contributions to science.Thus,the metrics of highly cited researchers are often linked to notions of breakthroughs,scientific excellence,and lone geniuses.Design/methodology/approach:In this study,we analyze a sample of individuals who appear on Clarivate Analytics’Highly Cited Researchers list.The main purpose is to juxtapose the characteristics of their research performance against the claim that the list captures a small fraction of the researcher population that contributes disproportionately to extending the frontier and gaining—on behalf of society—knowledge and innovations that make the world healthier,richer,sustainable,and more secure.Findings:The study reveals that the highly cited articles of the selected individuals generally have a very large number of authors.Thus,these papers seldom represent individual contributions but rather are the result of large collective research efforts conducted in research consortia.This challenges the common perception of highly cited researchers as individual geniuses who can be singled out for their extraordinary contributions.Moreover,the study indicates that a few of the individuals have not even contributed to highly cited original research but rather to reviews or clinical guidelines.Finally,the large number of authors of the papers implies that the ranking list is very sensitive to the specific method used for allocating papers and citations to individuals.In the"whole count"methodology applied by Clarivate Analytics,each author gets full credit of the papers regardless of the number of additional co-authors.The study shows that the ranking list would look very different using an alternative fractionalised methodology.Research limitations:The study is based on a limited part of the total population of highly cited researchers.Practical implications:It is concluded that"excellence"understood as highly cited encompasses very different types of research and researchers of which many do not fit with dominant preconceptions.Originality/value:The study develops further knowledge on highly cited researchers,addressing questions such as who becomes highly cited and the type of research that benefits by defining excellence in terms of citation scores and specific counting methods.