International science and geopolitics

Shifting patterns in international research cooperation

Goals and us

About us

We are a multidisciplinary research group primarily interested in studying the interplay between international scientific cooperation and geopolitics.

Our goals

Our goal is to examine the evolving dynamics and links between the global enterprise of science and the changing geopolitical landscape.

Our motivation

We believe that there is an urgent need for capacity-building, concepts, and policy advice that will help governments, university administrations, scientists and firms navigate this complex and rapidly changing context, allowing them to balance the benefits of international academic cooperation and openness with potential threats to sovereignty, security, prosperity, and democracy.

Why matters

Why does it matter?

Science was primarily an individualistic undertaking. It then evolved to become embedded in an institutional setting with the rise of universities in the Middle Ages. It then rose to the national setting as the state became an increasingly important funder and ‘customer’ of knowledge and education.

The team

Sylvia Schwaag Serger

Department of Economic History, Lund University

sylvia.schwaag_serger@ekh.lu.se

Principal investigator

Hyejin Kim

Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore

hyejin.kim@ekh.lu.se

Igor Martins

Faculty of History, University of Cambridge

im552@cam.ac.uk

Sofia Avdeitchikova Söderquist

Department of Economic History, Lund University

sofia.a.soderquist@gmail.com

Did you know?

Did you know...

That China has overtaken the United States in number of published articles per year?

Since at least the early 2000s, China has displayed consistent growth in number of published articles.

Yet, there is room to grow on per capita terms!

Chinese impressive growth in absolute numbers just tells part of the story. While Sweden is one of the most prolific countries in the world in terms of publication of scientific articles, China is still playing catching-up. One curiosity: if China produced the same number of articles per capita than the United States, in 2021 they would have reached more than 2 million articles published contaning at least one Chinese-based author.

The number of co-publications has also been consistently growing.

Nearly 5% of all academic production of the USA and the UK contained a collaboration between scholars based in both countries. US-Chinese co-publications were also on the rise until COVID-19 brought this progress to a halt...

... but why hasn't it happen with other partnerships?

This question remains unanswered. Why has the US-Chinese co-publications experienced such a severe decline in the aftermath of COVID-19 but other partnerships were mostly unaffected?

In 2021, US-Chinese co-publications represented 4% of all articles published between these two countries. This corresponded to 7% of all articles containing a Chinese-based scholars but almost 10% of the articles containing a US-based scholar.

Sino-American collaborative research represents a greater proportion of documents produced by US-based scholars than it does so for their Chinese-based counterparts.

From a qualitative perspective,
however, research indicates that internationally co-authored papers enjoy a higher citation impact than other types of publications (Pohl 2020; Pohl 2021). If these represent a larger proportion of papers produced by US-based scholars, then it is
possible to infer that they are currently the biggest beneficiaries of the collaborative efforts.

Could this be an issue of policy?

We do not know that just yet. What we know, so far, is that US-Chinese co-publications represented a larger fraction of US domestic production than Chinese domestic production. In short, it seems that as of 2021, Sino-American collaborative research is more important to US-based scholars in quantitative terms than to Chinese-based scholars. From a qualitative perspective, however, research indicates that internationally co-authored papers enjoy a higher citation impact than other types of publications. If these represent a larger proportion of papers produced by US-based scholars, then it is possible to infer that they are currently the biggest beneficiaries of the collaborative efforts. But one must pay attention...

... because the collaborative trends across fields of study are far from homogeneous.

Fields such as Social Sciences are historically less prone to collaborative efforts, which also make them more resilient to potential shocks.

Meanwhile, in Physics and Astronomy...

... collaborative efforts have historically been much more relevant. Here, we can see how COVID-19 heavily influenced the US-Chinese co-publication patterns. On the other hand, other partnerships proved to be robust to the effects of the pandemic on output. Why? This is precisely what we want to investigate!

We used Scopus to collect the data to produce these graphs. Check out our report on the shifting patterns in international collaboration for more details as well as our recent commentary and article published by Issues in Science and Technology

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Funding

We are grateful to the following supporters, without which this project would not be possible:

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