Articles
RSS SubscribeFriday 29th April 2005
Increased international collaboration in Australian scientific publications
by Australian Academy of Science
On average, scientific publications that have international collaboration are more highly cited and have higher impact than papers without international collaboration, demonstrating the value of international collaboration in raising the quality of the overall science output and in raising the visibility of Australia’s science effort. Thus, Australian scientists must continue to develop extensive links with international scientists. These links can be built up through informal interaction between individual scientists, or through formal links between the Australian science community and global scientific activities. A bibliometric analysis using the ISI Web of Knowledge online database, shown in the table below, indicates that for the disciplines in which Australia has significant formal engagement with global science activities (eg, space science, earth sciences), Australian publications have a higher level of international collaboration than the disciplines in which Australia has little formal engagement with global science activities (eg, clinical immunology and infectious disease, environment or ecology). The table also shows that the level of international collaboration in Australian publications has increased since 1997. While the analysis does have its limitations, the results suggest that formal linkages with global scientific activities do indeed result in higher levels of international collaboration.
| Discipline | Related international bodies | # Australian publications | # Australian publications with international collaboration | % of Australian publications with international collaboration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Australian Average (latest 6 months to 16 November 2004 only) | 13,314 | 5,584 | 41.9 | |
| Australian Average for the year 1997 | 20,806 | 7,538 | 30.4 | |
| Space science | IAU, URSI, COSPAR, SCOSTEP, FAGS | 2,703 | 2,210 | 81.8 |
| Chemistry & physics, pure and applied | IUPAC, IUPAP | 2,207 | 1,431 | 64.8 |
| Mathematics | IMU | 2,337 | 1,430 | 61.2 |
| Physics | IUPAP | 4,414 | 2,582 | 58.5 |
| Earth sciences | IGBP, IGU, INQUA, IUGG, IUGS, IUSS, SCAR, SCL, SCOR, WCRP | 7,222 | 4,007 | 55.5 |
| Molecular biology and genetics | IUBMB | 2,716 | 1,504 | 55.4 |
| Biology | IUBS | 2,280 | 1,150 | 50.4 |
| Biotechnology and applied microbiology | IUMS | 576 | 306 | 53.1 |
| Inorganic and nuclear chemistry | IUCr | 1,175 | 570 | 48.5 |
| Biochemistry and biophysics | IUBMB, IUPAB | 3,837 | 1,774 | 46.2 |
| Animal and plant Science | IUBS | 1,841 | 847 | 46.0 |
| Physiology | IUPS | 1,532 | 692 | 45.2 |
| Immunology | IUIS | 3,356 | 1,469 | 43.8 |
| Microbiology | IUMS | 3,720 | 1,630 | 43.8 |
| Clinical immunology and infectious disease | IUIS,WHO | 1,401 | 571 | 40.8 |
| Neurology | IBRO | 1,896 | 751 | 39.6 |
| Chemistry | IUPAC | 2,120 | 833 | 39.3 |
| Environment/Ecology | DIVERSITAS, MA, SCOPE | 6,377 | 2,472 | 38.8 |
| Psychology | IUPsyS | 4,944 | 1,646 | 33.3 |
| Pharmacology/Toxicology | IUPHAR, IUTOX | 3,237 | 1,068 | 33.0 |
| Food Science/Nutrition | IUNS, IUFoST | 1,545 | 462 | 29.9 |
The bibliometric analysis was done using the ISI Web of Knowledge ‘Current Contents Connect’ online search facility. This allowed searching for publications from journals and books that are grouped within a specific discipline category. For the analysis, disciplines were chosen from the available list provided by ISI that corresponded with the activities of global scientific bodies discussed in this report. The database was searched for publications from each discipline that had ‘Australia’ in the author address field. This produced the figures given in the column ‘# Australian publications’. Next, the database was searched for publications from each discipline or subject that had an author address containing ‘Australia’ AND an overseas country address. This produced the figures in the column ‘# Australian publications with international collaboration’. The search facility limited the number of terms that could be entered at any one time, so the 40 countries with the most number of publications, as reported on the ISI Essential Science Indicators website, were entered. These 40 countries account for most of the world’s scientific publications (>95%).
These disciplines were chosen from the list of fields provided by ISI for analysis as they relate to the work of corresponding global science bodies. There were no directly relevant discipline fields available for searching in the ISI Web of Knowledge database relating to the activities of IGU, IUHPS, IUTAM, IUAES, IUPESM and IHD.
