TY - JOUR
T1 - Openness and impact of leading scientific countries
AU - Baas, Jeroen
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2018 Wagner, Whetsell, Baas and Jonkers.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - The rapid rise of international collaboration over the past three decades, demonstrated in coauthorship of scientific articles, raises the question of whether countries benefit from cooperative science and how this might be measured. We develop and compare measures to ask this question. For all source publications in 2013, we obtained from Elsevier national-level full and fractional paper counts as well as accompanying field-weighted citation counts. Then we collected information from Elsevier on the percent of all internationally coauthored papers for each country, as well as Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) measures of the international mobility of the scientific workforce in 2013, and conducted a principle component analysis that produced an openness index. We added data from the OECD on government budget allocation on research and development for 2011 to tie in the public spending that contributed to the 2013 output. We found that openness among advanced science systems is strongly correlated with impact—the more internationally engaged a nation is in terms of coauthorships and researcher mobility, the higher the impact of scientific work. The results have important implications for policy making around investment, as well as the flows of students, researchers, and technical workers.
AB - The rapid rise of international collaboration over the past three decades, demonstrated in coauthorship of scientific articles, raises the question of whether countries benefit from cooperative science and how this might be measured. We develop and compare measures to ask this question. For all source publications in 2013, we obtained from Elsevier national-level full and fractional paper counts as well as accompanying field-weighted citation counts. Then we collected information from Elsevier on the percent of all internationally coauthored papers for each country, as well as Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) measures of the international mobility of the scientific workforce in 2013, and conducted a principle component analysis that produced an openness index. We added data from the OECD on government budget allocation on research and development for 2011 to tie in the public spending that contributed to the 2013 output. We found that openness among advanced science systems is strongly correlated with impact—the more internationally engaged a nation is in terms of coauthorships and researcher mobility, the higher the impact of scientific work. The results have important implications for policy making around investment, as well as the flows of students, researchers, and technical workers.
KW - impact measures
KW - mobility
KW - national rankings
KW - openness
KW - research and development
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85056909724&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3389/frma.2018.00010
DO - 10.3389/frma.2018.00010
M3 - Article
VL - 3
JO - Frontiers in Research metrics and Analytics
JF - Frontiers in Research metrics and Analytics
M1 - 10
ER -