Evaluation & Research |
Rising Role of China in International Scientific Research Collaboration
China National Center for Science and Technology Evaluation and Clarivate Analytics jointly released the report China’s International Scientific Research Collaboration in 2017. By integrating big data analysis and the viewpoints of experts, the report for the first time makes a thorough analysis on the development and current status of China’s international scientific collaboration in the past decade.
Using the internationally co-authored publications from Web of Science as a proxy of the international scientific collaboration, this report investigates China’s centrality in the collaboration network, its collaborating countries, regions, organizations, research fields, institutions as well as its contribution in large-scale collaborations by integrating bibliometric analysis and viewpoints of experts. Some key findings in the report: ● The overall results of the report show that with the increasing importance of China in the international collaboration network, China makes impressive breakthroughs both in quantity and quality of collaboration during the past decade.
● The percentage of papers funded by China in China’s internationally co-authored papers rose from 31.6% during 2006-2010 to 65.2% during 2011-2015. This is clear evidence that China has been encouraging international collaboration and investing more in science and technology. ● A novel centrality indicator is firstly proposed to measure the status and importance of a country in the international scientific collaboration network. China’s centrality rose from the 10th during 2006-2010 to the 7th during 2011-2015, which is most significant among all countries, demonstrating China’s rapidly growing importance in the global collaboration network. ● The citation impact of China’s internationally co-authored papers is significantly higher than that of China’s overall papers, demonstrating that international collaboration has improved the international academic impact of China’s research. ● Regarding the ESI highly cited papers that China co-authored with the US, Australia and Singapore, more than 40% of reprint authors are from China. This indicates that China is playing a relatively leading role in the high impact collaborative research. ● Among China’s domestic regions, Beijing, Shanghai and Jiangsu province produced the most co-authored papers. The total number of internationally co-authored papers from these three regions accounts for more than half of China’s overall international collaboration papers. ● Chinese Academy of Sciences published far more internationally co-authored papers than any other institutions in China. In terms of universities, Peking University, Zhejiang University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tsinghua University, and Fudan University published the most internationally co-authored papers. Peking University and Beijing Normal University are more active in international collaboration due to their higher percentage of co-authored papers. ● For the institutional collaborators, China co-authored the most papers with CNRS France, US Department of Energy, National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, and Harvard University. ● China is now collaborating more closely with the “One Belt One Road” countries and emerging as a key node in the collaboration network formed by the “One Belt One Road” countries. ● In the large-scale collaboration, namely the internationally co-authored papers with no less than 30 institutions and 100 authors, China contributed to 54.7% of these papers. ● China published the most co-authored papers in five ESI fields — Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, Clinical Medicine, and Materials Science. The percentages of internationally co-authored papers in Chemistry, Physics, Engineering and Materials Science continue increasing while the percentage in Clinical Medicine continues decreasing. ● The number of China’s internationally co-authored papers increase rapidly, like the increase of China’s overall output of publications. However, the percentage of internationally co-authored papers of China is still significantly lower than that of the US, the UK, Germany and France, which indicates that China is not as active as these well developed countries in international collaboration. For more details, please refer to the report: 中国国际科研合作现状报告 China’s International Scientific Research Collaboration |
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