A Global Comparison of Scientific Mobility and Collaboration According to National Scientific Capacities

Abstract

This study compares the flows of mobile researchers and the number of publications in international collaboration within the context of scientific and economic capacities. The goal is to identify the convergence or discrepancy of countries in mobility and collaboration and determine the positions and relative influence of countries in both processes. Using affiliation data from scientific publications, we analyze the distributions and networks of collaboration and mobility and their structural differences. The results show that there is a significant relationship between the flow of mobile researchers and the capacity for publishing with foreign partners in the more prolific countries, although mobility is always lower than collaboration. Size matters and scientific relationship are highly resource-dependent. Advanced and Proficient countries accumulate the highest proportion of the mobile authors and international publications with an extremely low representation of mobility in Developing and Lagging countries. In addition, the placement of countries is not always consistent in both networks, revealing distinct roles of mobility and collaboration, with particular instability for lower income countries. The more resources available in a country (both scientific and economic) the greater the likelihood of attracting foreign partners and mobilizing human capital. The policy relevance of these structural differences are described and a brief description of the limitations and future research are provided.

Ten Hot Topics around Scholarly Publishing

“…This oft-quoted factoid is based on data from a World Bank/Elsevier report from 2012 which relies on data exclusively from Scopus 45 . Similarly, many others have analyzed 'global' or international collaborations and mobility using the even more selective WoS database [137][138][139]. Research outputs in these contexts refers specifically to papers published in peer-reviewed journals that are indexed either in Scopus or WoS.…”

Mapeo de las Publicaciones Científicas entre América Latina, el Caribe y la Unión Europea

“…Chinchilla-Rodríguez et al (2012) observaron que los países más pequeños exhiben las tasas más altas de colaboración internacional, como el caso de la región Andina y del Caribe. Por otro lado, los países desarrollados atraen investigadores móviles y socios extranjeros para publicar (Chinchilla-Rodríguez et al 2018b).…”

“…En referencia a las disciplinas discretas dentro de los principales campos de investigación científica, la ciencia de la computación, incluida dentro del campo de investigación de la ingeniería (Figura viii) y más específicamente la nanotecnología, es una de las áreas de investigación que ha atraído más la atención de la internacionalización de la ciencia en la última década (Chinchilla-Rodríguez et al 2018a). En este sentido, es importante mapear este tipo de áreas emergentes para entender qué tipo de representación tiene cada país en el ámbito internacional, observar las relaciones de dependencia académica de los países pequeños y en desarrollo en estos ámbitos (Foladori 2006;Kay y Shapira 2009, 2011 y comprender cómo la colaboración científica fomentará los escenarios futuros.…”

Plagiarism in Brazil: A perspective of 25,000 PhD holders across the sciences

“…Whether this result means that Latin American editors are stricter with plagiarism than those from the US and Europe, for example, is an open question. Irrespective of this underexplored problem, LA countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Brazil have broadened their international collaborative research networks with many Anglophone and Asian countries ( 29,30 ). In these multicultural collaborative endeavors, shaped by a changing landscape for doing and communicating science, operating within similar research integrity frameworks is surely an asset for researchers and institutions involved ( 31-34 ).…”