International Co-authorship Relations in the Social Science Citation Index: Is Internationalization Leading the Network?

[Loet Leydesdorff]

International Co-authorship Relations in the Social Science Citation Index:
<http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.4242> 
Is Internationalization Leading the Network?


We analyze international co-authorship relations in the Social Science
Citation Index 2011 using all citable items in the DVD-version of this
index. Network statistics indicate four groups of nations: (i) an
Asian-Pacific one to which all Anglo-Saxon nations (including the UK and
Ireland) are attributed; (ii) a continental European one including also the
Latin-American countries; (iii) the Scandinavian nations; and (iv) a
community of African nations. Within the EU-28 (including Croatia), eleven
of the EU-15 states have dominant positions. Collapsing the EU-28 into a
single node leads to a bi-polar structure between the US and EU-28; China is
part of the US-pole. We develop an information-theoretical test to
distinguish whether international collaborations or domestic collaborations
prevail; the results are mixed, but the international dimension is more
important than the national one in the aggregated sets (this was found in
both SSCI and SCI). In France, however, the national distribution is more
important than the international one, while the reverse is true for most
European nations in the core group (UK, Germany, the Netherlands, etc.).
Decomposition of the USA in terms of states shows a similarly mixed result;
more US states are domestically than internationally oriented (in both SSCI
and SCI). The international networks have grown during the last decades in
addition to the national ones, but not by replacing them. 

 

Loet Leydesdorff, Han Woo Park, and Caroline Wagner

 

** apologies for cross-postings

 

  _____  

Loet Leydesdorff 

University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)

 <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net> loet at leydesdorff.net ;
<http://www.leydesdorff.net/> http://www.leydesdorff.net/ 
Honorary Professor,  <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/> SPRU, University of
Sussex; Visiting Professor,  <http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html>
ISTIC, Beijing;
 <http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en>
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en  



 

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