| Abstract: |
This paper examines international and domestic collaborations using data from
an original survey of corresponding authors and Web of Science data of
articles with a US coauthor in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Biotechnology
and Applied Microbiology, and Particle and Field Physics. The data allows us
to investigate the connections among coauthors and the views of corresponding
authors about the collaboration. We have four main findings. First, we find
that US collaborations have increased across US cities as well as across
international borders, with the nature of collaborations across cities
resembling that across countries. Second, face-to-face meetings are important
in collaborations: most collaborators first met working in the same
institution and communicate often through meetings coauthors from distant
location. Third, the main reason for most collaborations are to combine the
specialized knowledge and skills of coauthors, with however, substantial
differences in the mode of collaborations between small lab-based science and
big science, where international collaborations are more prevalent. Fourth, we
find that citation rates are higher in international collaborations than in
domestic collaborations in biotech but not in the other two fields. Moreover,
in all three fields, papers with the same number of coauthors had lower
citations if they were international collaborations. Overall, our findings
suggest that all collaborations are best viewed from a framework of
collaborations across space broadly, rather than in terms of international as
opposed to domestic collaborative activity. |