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Consolidation in a Crisis: Patterns of International Collaboration in COVID-19 Research

  • May 2020
Authors:
Caroline V Fry
Caroline V Fry
Yi Zhang at University of Technology Sydney
Yi Zhang
Xiaojing Cai at Zhejiang University
Xiaojing Cai
Caroline Wagner at The Ohio State University
Caroline Wagner
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Abstract

The COVID-19 global pandemic led scientists to turn their research agendas towards coronavirus related research. This paper seeks to understand whether a catastrophic and urgent event, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, accelerates or reverses trends in international collaboration, especially in and between China and the United States. This early review shows that COVID-19 teams are smaller than those on coronavirus related research in the preceding period, and include fewer nations. The results reveal that the United States and China were, and continue to be, at the center of the global network in coronavirus related research, and continue their roles as the largest contributors to, and home to the main funders of, coronavirus related research during the global pandemic. An examination of the international collaborative activities of scientists based in these two
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Consolidation in a Crisis: Patterns of International
Collaboration in COVID-19 Research
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A unified approach to mapping and clustering of bibliometric networks
Article
In the analysis of bibliometric networks, researchers often use mapping and clustering techniques in a combined fashion. Typically, however, mapping and clustering techniques that are used together rely on very different ideas and assumptions. We propose a unified approach to mapping and clustering of bibliometric networks. We show that the VOS mapping technique and a weighted and parameterized variant of modularity-based clustering can both be derived from the same underlying principle. We illustrate our proposed approach by producing a combined mapping and clustering of the most frequently cited publications that appeared in the field of information science in the period 1999–2008.