The number of international collaborations has tripled in the past fifteen years, reveals an analysis of more than 10 million papers tracked by the Web of Science.
The study, published in Scientometrics in November 2017, found that 21.3% (418,866 articles) of the total scientific output in 2015 featured international co-authors, compared to 10.7% (136,483 papers) in 2000. The network of countries plugged into these international connections has also grown from 174 in 2000 to 200 in 2015.
The growth in global collaborations is a “very positive” trend, says study co-author Eduardo Motta Albuquerque, an economist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. Many of the world’s biggest problems are global in scale and require international cooperation, he says