Plain-tailed wrens coordinate with each other to sing duets by inhibiting motor circuits in the brain.
Image credit: Melissa J. Coleman.
Edited by Dean Keith Simonton, University of California, Davis, CA, and accepted by the Editorial Board November 20, 2015 (received for review June 3, 2015)
Significance
The evolution of the patterns of international scientific collaboration plays an important role in the social construction of science to design efficient research policies and to support the production of knowledge. However, in studies of science, little is known about how patterns of international research collaboration for fields of science have evolved in the past four decades. This study shows, for the first time to our knowledge, starting from pioneering results described by literature in the 1970s and 1990s, that the long-run patterns of international scientific collaboration are generating a convergence between applied and basic fields. This convergence of collaboration patterns across research fields might be one of contributing factors that supports the evolution of scientific disciplines.
Abstract
International research collaboration plays an important role in the social construction and evolution of science. Studies of science increasingly analyze international collaboration across multiple organizations for its impetus in improving research quality, advancing efficiency of the scientific production, and fostering breakthroughs in a shorter time. However, long-run patterns of international research collaboration across scientific fields and their structural changes over time are hardly known. Here we show the convergence of international scientific collaboration across research fields over time. Our study uses a dataset by the National Science Foundation and computes the fraction of papers that have international institutional coauthorships for various fields of science. We compare our results with pioneering studies carried out in the 1970s and 1990s by applying a standardization method that transforms all fractions of internationally coauthored papers into a comparable framework. We find, over 1973–2012, that the evolution of collaboration patterns across scientific disciplines seems to generate a convergence between applied and basic sciences. We also show that the general architecture of international scientific collaboration, based on the ranking of fractions of international coauthorships for different scientific fields per year, has tended to be unchanged over time, at least until now. Overall, this study shows, to our knowledge for the first time, the evolution of the patterns of international scientific collaboration starting from initial results described by literature in the 1970s and 1990s. We find a convergence of these long-run collaboration patterns between the applied and basic sciences. This convergence might be one of contributing factors that supports the evolution of modern scientific fields.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: mario.coccia{at}ircres.cnr.it.
Author contributions: M.C. conceived the study; M.C. designed research; M.C. and L.W. performed research; M.C. contributed new analytic tools; M.C. acquired, analyzed, and interpreted data; and M.C. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. D.K.S. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1510820113/-/DCSupplemental.
Convergence of applied and basic sciences
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