Worldwide Collaborations Across Scientific Fields Examined

International collaborations are an important part of research, but they haven’t been thoroughly studied. A new paper looks at international collaborations in different fields—including chemistry—over time (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2016, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1510820113). Authors Mario Coccia of Arizona State University and the National Research Council of Italy and Lili Wang of the United Nations University in the Netherlands examined an NSF database of research publications in different fields from 1997 to 2012. They calculated the percentage of papers that have international coauthors then compared it with previous studies of collaborations starting in the 1970s. The total number of international collaborations has increased in all fields, the authors found. However, the ranking of different research fields based on the number of international collaborations has remained surprisingly stable over the decades. Astronomy and physics have had the highest percentage of international collaborations since the 1970s. Chemistry sits toward the bottom of the fields studied, and the percentage of international collaborations has remained steady. Though basic research fields used to perform much more international collaborative research, the authors found that basic and applied fields are converging in this area.