The community structure of global scientific collaboration – lecture at Networks2021 conference

Lecture by Frank Takes on the Networks 2021 conference

Authors: Hanjo Boekhout; Eelke Heemskerk; Frank Takes

In this work we study the structure of global scientific collaboration, in an attempt to better understand the internationalization of research. In particular, we are interested in the existence of closely collaborating scientific communities. Indeed, it is well-known that even though science knows no borders, collaboration ties are not randomly created between individual scholars. Instead, we anticipate geographical, political and cultural factors to play a crucial role in this process. In this paper we set out to empirically investigate to what extent this is the case by providing a large-scale analysis of 23 million publications from Web of Science in the period 2008—2019.