Effects of international collaboration and knowledge moderation on China's nanotechnology research impacts

Abstract

Access to this document was granted through an Emerald subscription provided by emerald-srm:305060 [] For AuthorsIf you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -Recent studies report that China is becoming a leading nation in the quantity of scientific output, including in the emerging field of nanotechnology. In nanotechnology, bibliometric measures based on citations also indicate improvements in the research impacts of Chinese scientific papers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of international collaboration, including the role of knowledge moderation through Chinese researchers who collaborate in both domestic and international scientific cooperation, on the impacts of Chinese nanotechnology research publications. Design/methodology/approach -Using a nanotechnology publication dataset, bibliometric analysis and statistical testing are adopted to explore the issues raised in the study. Findings -International collaboration, through direct collaboration and indirectly through Chinese knowledge moderators, has a positive impact on the quality of Chinese research, controlling for language, discipline, research capacity, and other factors. Originality/value -The concept of a Chinese knowledge moderator is introduced to identify Chinese researchers who bridge scientific worlds by publishing scientific papers with both domestic and international colleagues. This concept is operationalized to capture the indirect impacts in China of international knowledge linkages and spillovers including those associated with overseas Chinese researchers and with overseas returnees.

Does “birds of a feather flock together” matter—Evidence from a longitudinal study on US–China scientific collaboration

“…In spite of the rich volume of results in the literature, they are in disagreement (Tang & Shapira, 2012). Since the seminar work of Katz and Martin (1997), the amount of evidence supporting the positive correlation between collaboration and research performance has been accumulating.…”

“…A CKM is a researcher who bridges two different scientific communities of China and other countries via intensive collaboration (Tang & Shapira, 2012). In this particular research, the notion is confined to the US and China collaboration context.…”

“…One is pooled cross-sectional data of Chinese nano publications, including all nano articles reporting at least one Chinese affiliation indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database during the years 1990-2006. For more details on constructing and cleaning this dataset, please refer to Tang and Shapira (2012). The other one is a longitudinal dataset of 77 Chinese knowledge moderator (CKM) nanotechnology publications from the same range of years.…”

“…Adapting the model developed by Tang and Shapira (2012), the dependent variable research quality, which is often used interchangeably with research impact in some previous studies (Moed, 2005;Moed, 2009), is measured by two citation-based indicators: the journal impact factor, denoted by JIF, and the number of citations received, denoted as CITATIONS.…”

China's global growth in social science research: Uncovering evidence from bibliometric analyses of SSCI publications (1978–2013)

“…This conjecture is partially supported by our data. When grouping Hong Kong's SSCI publications by Chinese versus non-Chinese surnames based on the thesauri developed by Tang and Shapira (2012), we found that about 86% involve at least one researcher with a Chinese family name over the examined period. When excluding foreign institutions, the figure remains at the same rate.…”