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Editorial article, editorial: research collaboration and networks: characteristics, evolution and trends.

• 1 Faculty of Information and Media Studies, Western University, London, ON, Canada
• 2 São Paulo State University (UNESP), São Paulo, Brazil
• 3 School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

Editorial on the Research Topic Research Collaboration and Networks: Characteristics, Evolution and Trends

Introduction

In this age of big science, collaboration is increasingly playing an important role in implementing major scientific breakthroughs, solving complex scientific problems, promoting cultural understanding, improving research efficiency, achieving research excellence and knowledge innovation, and sharing scientific and technological resources, etc. ( Andrade et al., 2009 ). Generally speaking, the research network is the manifestation of scientific cooperation. As a popular Research Topic, works on scientific collaboration and network have focused on a variety of terminologies and methods, diverse disciplines and views, different stages and levels, and various factors and challenges ( Newman, 2001 ; Sonnenwald, 2007 ).

This Research Topic aims to discuss novel approaches and new insights to uncover the characteristics of research collaboration networks and to bring new perspectives to understand the nature and trends of scientific collaboration.

Papers in This Research Topic

The six papers published in this Research Topic were all reviewed by two independent reviewers.

In the paper “Ontology-Based Graphs of Research Communities: A Tool for Understanding Threat Reduction Networks,” Ambrosiano et al. propose a method for storing, manipulating, and visualizing complex multidimensional research networks using an ontology-based graph database. The authors used the U.S. Biological Threat Reduction Program (BTRP) as a case study, and analyzed a series of seven BTRP genome sequencing training workshops, showing how the workshops created a growing network of participants and countries over time. The ontology-based approach, which involved capturing concept and relationship hierarchies, is applicable to other research communities or multidimensional social networks.

In the paper “Collaborative Patterns, Productivity, and Research Impact in the Careers of Star Researchers in a Japanese Semiconductor Company,” Maeki et al. demonstrate how long-term exposition and collaboration with other high-achieving researchers can play a significant role in determining a successful career in terms of productivity and impact. A collaborative network of 6,057 inventors and a subset of 15 star researchers in a Japanese semiconductor company over a long period of time was analyzed. Their results suggest that staying aligned in one research direction, long-term exposure to a diverse group of researchers, and early mentorship helped the researchers to attain their achievements.

In the paper “Then and Now, Mapping the 25 Year Evolution and Impact of North American Vascular Biology Organization Science Through Publications of its Founding and Current Members,” Galis et al. present general methods to study the evolution of a biomedical organization and its impact over time. Publications by members of the North American Vascular Biology Organization (NAVBO) over a 25-year period were collected and analyzed to understand how NAVBO fostered scientific collaborations and exchanges of expertise. UCSD Map of Science and Classification System was then used to show the evolution of scientific topics covered by NAVBO members.

In the paper “Collaborative Processes in Science and Literature: an In-Depth Look at the Cases of CERN and SIC,” Leogrande and Nicassio examine how the process of collaboration works in science and literature. For this purpose, the authors compared the collaboration process at the Center Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) on high-energy physics with the collaboration process used at Scrittura Industriale Collettiva (SIC) to produce a Great Open Novel, a collective book written by hundreds of people. The authors conclude that, no matter the field or the number of people it involves, a process of collaboration needs a structure to organize its plurality; this structure implies a path to follow, a task division, a constant coordination and control of participants' contributions.

In the paper “Scientific Collaboration at National Institute of the Atlantic Forest (Brazil) on Scopus Database: Analysis of Institutional Domain,” Freitas and Rosas introduce co-authorship analysis as a method in determining institutional domain. Using 138 articles published by 41 researchers at the National Institute of the Atlantic Forest, the authors demonstrate the potential of co-authorship analysis for the creation of a scientific and collaborative identity in an institutional domain.

In the paper “Mapping Collaborations and Partnerships in SDG Research,” Payumo et al. examine research output and collaboration supporting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The authors employed two additional lenses of collaboration, repeat collaboration and collaboration time point, to quantify and visualize co-authorship data sourced from Microsoft Academic Graph. The study's results show an increased collaboration rate over time but the majority of collaborations in SDG-related research only happened once. Hence, the authors identified core institutions that could help influence more consistent collaboration and sustain or grow the SDG-related research network.

The articles published in this Research Topic have contributed to research collaboration methodology by: demonstrating the use of ontology-based approach to analyze research communities; adopting co-authorship analysis as a method in determining institutional domain; and employing two additional lenses of collaboration, repeat collaboration and collaboration time point, to quantify and visualize co-authorship data. In terms of practice, it has been shown that: by staying aligned in one research direction and getting exposed to a diverse group of researchers, a researcher can achieve success in terms of productivity and impact; and that no matter the field or the number of people it involves, a process of collaboration needs a structure to organize its plurality.

We hope that in the future, especially with the development of big data and artificial intelligence, more consequential research on theoretical frameworks, methods, and applications will be conducted in the area of scientific collaboration and networks.

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Andrade, H. B., de Los Reyes Lopez, E., and Martín, T. B. (2009). Dimensions of scientific collaboration and its contribution to the academic research groups' scientific quality. Res. Evaluation 18, 301–311. doi: 10.3152/095820209X451041

CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Newman, M. E. (2001). The structure of scientific collaboration networks. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 98, 404–409. doi: 10.1073/pnas.98.2.404

Sonnenwald, D. H. (2007). Scientific collaboration. Annu. Rev. Inform. Sci. Technol. 41, 643–681. doi: 10.1002/aris.2007.1440410121

Keywords: scientific collaboration, research networks, collaboration characteristics, research collaboration methodology, collaboration trends

Citation: Ajiferuke I, Grácio MCC and Yang S (2021) Editorial: Research Collaboration and Networks: Characteristics, Evolution and Trends. Front. Res. Metr. Anal. 6:690986. doi: 10.3389/frma.2021.690986

Received: 05 April 2021; Accepted: 09 April 2021; Published: 07 May 2021.

Edited and reviewed by: Dietmar Wolfram , University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, United States

Copyright © 2021 Ajiferuke, Grácio and Yang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Siluo Yang, 58605025@qq.com

This article is part of the Research Topic

Research Collaboration and Networks: Characteristics, Evolution, and Trends

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• Published: 17 October 2012

Collaborations

The rise of research networks

• Jonathan Adams 1  

Nature volume  490 ,  pages 335–336 ( 2012 ) Cite this article

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New collaboration patterns are changing the global balance of science. Established superpowers need to keep up or be left behind, says Jonathan Adams.

A fundamental shift is taking place in the geography of science. Networks of research collaboration are expanding in every region of the globe. The established science superpowers of the United States and Europe have dominated the research world since 1945. Yet this Atlantic axis is unlikely to be the main focus of research by 2045, or perhaps even by 2020.

New regional networks are reinforcing the competence and capacity of emerging research economies, and changing the global balance of research activity. This may well reveal different ways of approaching challenges, and solutions that are different to those of Western institutions. If the science superpowers are to avoid being left behind, they will need to step out of their comfort zones to keep up with the dynamism of the new players in this shifting landscape.

Collaboration is normally a good thing from a wider public perspective. Knowledge is better transferred and combined by collaboration, and co-authored papers tend to be cited more frequently 1 . But could increased global collaboration mean a blending of objectives that risks leaving bland priorities?

Co-authorship is a valid proxy for collaboration because few scientists surrender credit for their papers lightly, so we can assume that sharing of authorship reflects a tangible engagement. Such publication data are readily available, cover many countries and research disciplines to a good depth, and have reasonable consistency across decades.

Changes in the balance of research done by the lone scientist and that done by teams can be seen in co-authorship data 2 . Co-authorship has been increasing inexorably 3 , 4 . Recently it has exploded.

An issue of Nature today has a similar number of Letters to one from 60 years ago, but at least four times more authors 5 . Similar observations have been documented from clinical science to law. In the early 1980s, papers with more than 100 authors were rare. By 1990, the annual tally with that number exceeded 500 — and it has kept growing. The first paper with 1,000 authors was published in 2004; a paper with 3,000 authors came in 2008. By last year, a total of 120 physics papers had more than 1,000 authors and 44 had more than 3,000 (ref. 6 ). Many of these are from collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland.

This upwards trend in multi-authorship will continue through shared global priorities in health, energy, climate and social structures, propelled in part by international agencies such as the World Health Organization. Some of this growth will not be true collaboration but will come from independent contributions to joint efforts, usually in the form of data, that involve only weak intellectual interaction.

Blurred borders

Papers with hundreds of co-authors contribute to the apparent pervasiveness of collaboration between countries. For example, every country in Europe co-authors with every other country in the region. For the United Kingdom and Germany, this collaboration is relatively intense and represents many individual links. In 2011, the two countries had around 10,000 joint publications in journals indexed on Thomson Reuters' Web of Science — double the total in 2003 and about 10% of each country's total output. Malta, by contrast, shares only 50 papers per year with the United Kingdom, but that represents more than 25% of its total publication output. Consequently, distinguishing Malta's own science performance is already impossible. This blurring of national distinctiveness could be a growing issue.

According to data from Web of Science, the United States currently collaborates on 3–4% of its papers with each of China (now its most frequent partner, with 19,141 papers in 2011), the United Kingdom (19,090) and Germany (16,753). These totals have all roughly doubled in the past decade and have increased by half as a percentage of US total output. No country shared more than 1,000 papers in 1989 with any partner. US collaboration with Asia is rising steeply, as is collaboration between countries in western Europe. There is no reason to suppose that this will not continue.

China's rapid growth since 2000 is leading to closer research collaboration with Japan (up fourfold since 1999), Taiwan (up eightfold), South Korea (up tenfold), Australia (more than tenfold) and with every other research-active country in the Asia-Pacific region.

The rapid growth of each nation's research base and regional links, driven by relatively strong economies investing in innovation, will undoubtedly produce a regional research labour force to be reckoned with by 2020. Already, cutting-edge technology can be sourced from research developments in South Korea as well as those in Germany.

India has a growing research network with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, although it is not as frequent a collaborator with China as one might expect 7 . In the Middle East, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have a strong research partnership that is drawing in neighbours including Tunisia and Algeria. The annual tally of joint Egyptian–Saudi Arabian papers has risen tenfold in the past decade and is accelerating. Less than 5% of these papers have a co-author from the United States, the biggest partner outside the region for both countries.

Latin America has an emerging research network focused around Brazil, which — despite language differences — has doubled its collaboration with Argentina, Chile and Mexico in the past five years. By contrast, Africa has three distinct networks: in southern Africa, in French-speaking countries in West Africa and in English-speaking nations in East Africa.

These clusters indicate that proximity is just one of several factors in networks. Nigeria, for example, collaborates not with its neighbours in West Africa but with co-linguists in East Africa. This mirrors a global tendency to use paths of least resistance to partnership, rather than routes that might provide other strategic gains. Such language links have historically benefited the United Kingdom through alliances with Commonwealth countries that speak English and have adopted similar research structures. The United Kingdom cannot rely on this to continue.

This growth of regional collaboration has many implications. It amplifies the development of emergent research economies. Researchers in Asia, for example, do not need recognition from European and US authors if their research is being cited and used by partners within the region. In the short term, students will recognize attractive opportunities closer to home, with fewer alienating cultural challenges than many European campuses have offered.

Singapore, for example, is already reaping the benefits of a 1998 policy change to attract foreign students. Students from China, India and the ten countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) now comprise about 20% of Singapore's university intake — around 11,000 full-time students — with another 20,000 part-time students in other colleges. Students from those countries choose Singapore for its proximity, its lower cost of living compared with Europe and the United States and its generous government scholarships. Job opportunities are excellent: bursary holders sign a bond to work in Singapore for a fixed period after graduation and the government helps them to find a job that fits their skills 8 .

All of this means that the significance of Western research economies as preferred partners for research could dwindle. To meet this challenge, these economies need to do much more than just take fees from immigrant postgraduate students.

The maverick and the marginal may find a highly collaborative world a difficult place to flourish.

The United States and the United Kingdom must build new networks by actively exporting students to burgeoning science centres such as China and India. Researchers must stop expecting scientists from the new powerhouses to come to them, and should visit collaborators to experience different approaches — and be ready to learn, not just to teach. Travelling recently in the Pacific basin, I encountered many university leaders trying to increase collaboration with Europe, but finding it difficult to identify responsive contacts, despite having excellent facilities and staff to offer.

In short, countries in science's old guard must drop their patrician tendencies, open up clear communication channels and join in with new alliances as equal participants before they find themselves the supplicants.

Collaboration between the public and private sectors has become more apparent because of government interest in exploiting research for economic competitiveness. Some data show that industrial investment in research seems to be dropping — perhaps a reaction to the recession, but the trend seems to be long term, at least in the United Kingdom 9 . Governments need to develop an industrial policy that complements science policy. Incentives for collaborative innovation investment that draws directly on the science base would be a good start.

Patrician to participant

So what are the costs and benefits of collaboration? It provides access to resources, including funding, facilities and ideas. It will be essential for grand challenges in physics, environment and health to have large, international teams supported by major facilities and rich data, which encourage the rapid spread of knowledge.

Collaborative papers tend to get cited more often. For example, those published jointly by UK and US authors are cited on average more often than either nation domestically. It also works at the institutional level, so Harvard University gets a boost from collaborative papers with the University of Cambridge, and even in Nature the US–UK co-papers get relatively more citations 1 . And it follows through to industrial collaboration: when the University of Oxford collaborates with GlaxoSmithKline, for example, the papers are cited roughly four times as often as the world average for their field.

Research networks are a tool of international diplomacy. Germany exports excellent research equipment within its partnerships. China expands its cultural influence through the regional programmes it funds.

As for costs, collaboration takes time and travel and means a shared agenda. Of wider concern as teams proliferate is that individuals could end up working only on topics that peer consensus defines as the most interesting. The diversity of choice and opportunity may be diminished. The risk is that international, national and institutional agendas may become driven by the same bland establishment consensus.

This global tendency for convergence became obvious in 1997 when Tony Blair, then UK prime minister, adopted the same technology priorities set out by Bill Clinton and Al Gore in their 1992 presidential campaign, including biotechnology, health and environment. By 2000, the UK regional development agencies had supported the same missions rather than choose those that played to regional university strengths 10 . Leading research universities in North America, Europe and Asia identify strategic missions in similar areas.

It is difficult to go your own way in a village, even one that is global. But the success of science has been the crossing of separate strands of thought and practice that are more innovative at the edges than at the core. The iconoclastic, the maverick and the marginal may find a highly collaborative world a difficult place to flourish. Research-funding agencies should maintain a balance. Collaborative grand challenges seize headlines, but so do Nobel prizes — and only three people can share one of those.

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Adams, J. The rise of research networks. Nature 490 , 335–336 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/490335a

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