When a Country is Open, Do They Have Strong Science Too?

As no scientist is an island, the overall scientific enterprise grows stronger when people work together. But, an interesting question emerges from this concept for us to explore: how can we quantify the effect of collaboration on productivity and impact on science? In the October 5 issue of Nature, Caroline Wagner, Ph.D. of the Ohio State University and Koen Jonker’s, Ph.D. of the European Commission Joint Research Center published an interesting analysis of the association of a country’s “openness” and its scientific productivity. The authors assembled data from the Scopus database—a wealth of information on citations from peer-reviewed scientific journals—and data on workforce mobility from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Drs. Wagner and Jonkers developed an “openness” measure to look at international engagement. This measure is a composite of “numbers of scientists emigrating from, immigrating to, and returning to a country, plus international co-authorships.” These data encompassed activities in 33 countries and included 3-year citation data for 2.5 million calendar year 2013 publications across all scholarly fields. Fortunately, because the authors shared their data freely, we could easily download it and dive into the numbers. Figure 1 is a reproduction of the figure the authors published in their paper. It shows a reasonably strong association between a country’s openness and the citation impact of its scientific work; ...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: blog Open Mike bibliometrics publications Source Type: funding