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Do international nonstop flights foster influential research? Evidence from Sino-US scientific collaboration
Abstract
The tacit nature of knowledge suggests that face-to-face interactions in international academic collaborations are irreplaceable. Yet, such anecdotal evidence has not been adequately examined in the extant literature. Using the difference-in-differences estimation strategy, this paper investigates the causal effect of international nonstop flights on the quantity of high-impact Sino-US joint publications over the period between January 2009 and December 2018. We find that, on average, US-China international nonstop flights boost the production of influential articles aggregated at Chinese cities, with cities with less human capital earning more benefits. We do not find evidence in support of the crowding-out effect indicating this positive effect comes at the expense of domestic and international collaboration opportunities with other countries. These findings remain robust with various specifications. Policy implications for promoting global collaboration through face-to-face communication are discussed in the end.
... Similarly, Koh et al. (2024) showed that the development of the Begin subway impacted collaborative patents on an intra-urban scale. Hu et al. (2022), using a difference-in-differences framework, provide evidence that nonstop flights between China and the U.S. significantly enhance the production of highly cited joint papers. However, most of these findings are limited to single country, specifically US or China, restricting their broader applicability. ...
... Future analyses of the impact of transport accessibility on research collaboration should consider the potential crowding-out effect, where the development of one type of collaboration may come at the expense of another. A study by Hu et al. (2022) examines whether increased international nonstop flights affect domestic and non-U.S. collaborations in China. ...
This article analyzes the impact of the availability of long-haul flights on international scientific collaboration. The background assumption is that a wider availability of long-distance flights enables greater mobility for scientists, which in turn increases the likelihood of long-distance research collaboration. The analytical framework of this article is based on a quasi-experimental approach. Specifically, a discontinuity in the global network of air routes due to regulatory requirements is used as a source of random selection—i.e., a natural experiment. Two complementary methods are used to model the effect: instrumental variable design and regression discontinuity. Combining the bibliometric data from Microsoft Academic Graph and flight data from the International Civil Aviation Organization, this paper provides evidence of a causal relation between air transport availability and research collaboration. The results show that direct long-haul flights positively impact the number of papers co-authored by scholars based in both the connected cities. The implications of these results for science policy are discussed in the context of the virtualization of scientific communication resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and air transport’s negative climate impacts.
... For instance, Catalini et al. (2018) conducted a quasiexperiment and found that the introduction of low-cost airlines increased the quantity and quality of collaboration. Similarly, Hu et al. (2022) examined the impact of direct flights between China and the United States on scientific collaboration and found that it boosted influential papers in China. ...
... Despite advancements in virtual communication, faceto-face collaboration is difficult to replicate, which hinders mutual learning among scientists (van der Wouden & Youn, 2023) and the generation of creative ideas (Brucks & Levav, 2022;Horvát & Uzzi, 2022). In contrast, increasing offline meetings can lead to an improvement in the citation impact of co-publications papers (Catalini et al., 2020;Hu et al., 2022). ...
This study examines the impact of geographic distance on scientific collaboration, with a focus on the mobility of coauthors as a proxy for changes in distance. While advancements in information, communication, and transportation technologies have facilitated collaboration across distances, the extent to which these means of communication compensate for the lack of face-to-face interaction remains a subject of ongoing debate. By utilizing a matching method to construct two groups of scientist pairs and comparing the changes in their collaboration performance before and after mobility, the causal effect of geographic change on collaboration is estimated. The findings indicate that when collaborators who previously resided in the same city relocate to different cities, the productivity and citation impact of their co-publications are significantly reduced. These results suggest that physical proximity still plays a crucial role in scientific collaboration despite the availability of technological means for remote collaboration.
... According to (Hu et al., 2022;Y. Yu et al., 2024), the production of chips holds a unique status as the core element within the semiconductor industry, impacting national economic development and international competitiveness. ...
This paper examines the impact of China's neo-mercantilist policies on its semiconductor industry. China strategically employs a neo-mercantilist approach to enhance its technological capabilities and strengthen its position in the global semiconductor sector. The research method used in the paper is qualitative. The study analyzes the multifaceted strategies encompassing industrial policies, trade practices, and technological advancements to understand their contributions to the industry's growth and resilience. It also explores how this growth benefits China's economy and highlights the role of economic factors in shaping political partnerships. The findings demonstrate that China's neo-mercantilist policies have played a pivotal role in fostering the development of its semiconductor sector through targeted industrial policies and trade practices. The emphasis on technological advancements has reduced dependence on foreign technology and enabled the production of high-quality semiconductors domestically. The semiconductor industry's growth in China has positively impacted the economy, contributing to job creation, increased exports, and enhanced economic competitiveness. Moreover, the paper highlights the importance of economic factors in driving political partnerships, as China's semiconductor industry growth has facilitated collaborations based on mutual economic interests.
... 14 China plans to invite 50,000 young Americans to China on exchange and study programs over the coming five years to recover youth-to-youth exchange. 15 On the American side, in addition to a gradual increase of nonstop flights to foster people-to-people exchange (He, 2024;Hu et al., 2022), renewing Chinese and American science and technology bonds is urgently needed (Gilbert & Mallapaty, 2024). Resuming and expanding the US-China Social and Culture Exchange and Fulbright China Program that was terminated in 2020 would be a good start. ...
This study reveals that, following bilateral reduced international visitation and academic exchange, Sino-American scientific collaboration is positioned at a turning point in a declining course. American international students originating from China have declined by nearly 22%, and American students studying in China plummeted to 1.8% of the number in 2018–2019. US-China mutuality in scientific collaboration has also declined remarkably. At the same time, the concentration of influential research collaborated between the United States and China is consistently greater than both nations’ research outputs. Following the discussion of possible substitutes and the roles of American and Chinese researchers in global basic science and emerging issues, I argue that the two nations are so entwined in scientific collaboration that an adversarial rivalry perspective misses much of reality. In the face of rising uncertainties and global disasters, humanity does not have time to waste on nationalistic competitions. It is time for visionary leadership from both countries to promote intellectual exchange and scientific collaboration to address pressing global challenges.
COVID‐19 has emerged as a major research hotspot and trending topic in recent years, leading to increased publications and citations of related papers. While concerns exist about the potential citation boost in journals publishing these papers, the specifics are not fully understood. This study uses a generalized difference‐in‐differences approach to examine the impact of publishing COVID‐19 papers on journal citation metrics in the Health Sciences fields. Findings indicate that journals publishing COVID‐19 papers in 2020 received significantly higher citation premiums due to COVID‐19 in 2020 and continued to benefit from the premium in 2021 in certain fields. In contrast, journals that began publishing COVID‐19 papers in 2021 experienced weaker citation premiums. The citation premiums exhibit some negative spillover effect: Although the publication volume of non‐COVID‐19 papers also surged, these papers experienced insignificant or negative citation gains, even when published in the same journals as COVID‐19 papers. COVID‐19 papers published in high‐impact journals brought higher citation premiums than those in low‐impact journals in most fields, indicating a potential Matthew effect. These citation premiums can affect various citation‐based journal metrics, such as our simulated impact factor and SCImago Journal Rank, to different degrees. Compared to the simulated impact factor, other normalized journal metrics are less influenced by citation premiums. The results highlight a “gold rush” pattern in which early entrants establish their citation advantage in research hotspots and caution against using citation‐based metrics for research assessment.
Using novel monthly air passenger traffic data, we assess the impact of U.S.-China tensions on people in flows from China to the U.S. We find that there was a 6 percent decline in air passenger flows from China to the U.S. compared to other source countries during the period between 2017 and 2019. When differentiated by geographical locations, relative to other U.S. airports, U.S. airports near universities with a significant presence of Chinese students are found to have experienced a more than 10 percent annual drop in passengers originating from China. A further investigation reveals that the decline in people in flows is mainly attributed to the loss of passenger arrivals in August and that this decline is consistently more significant than the decrease experienced by airports near tourist destinations during the same period. These findings provide updated evidence of the detrimental effect a hostile political climate could have on international people mobility between two major scientific powers.
The government has abandoned its ‘zero-COVID’ policy and researchers from inside and outside the country are organizing to meet. The government has abandoned its ‘zero-COVID’ policy and researchers from inside and outside the country are organizing to meet. Credit: Andy Wong/AP/Shutterstock Passengers arrive at Terminal 3 international arrival hall of the Beijing Capital International Airport. Passengers arrive at Terminal 3 international arrival hall of the Beijing Capital International Airport.
Literature about the scholarly impact of scientific research offers very few contributions on private sector research, and the comparison with public sector. In this work, we try to fill this gap examining the citation-based impact of Italian 2010–2017 publications distinguishing authorship by the private sector from the public sector. In particular, we investigate the relation between different forms of collaboration and impact: how intra-sector private publications compare to public, and how private-public joint publications compare to intra-sector extramural collaborations. Finally, we assess the different effect of international collaboration on private and public research impact, and whether there occur differences across research fields.
Since 1990, a large and dynamic global science system has evolved, based on grass roots collaboration, and resting on the resources, infrastructure and personnel housed by national science systems. Euro-American science systems have become intensively networked in a global duopoly; and many other countries have built national science systems, including a group of large- and middle-sized countries that follow semi-autonomous trajectories based on state investment, intensive national network building, and international engagement, without integrating tightly into the global duopoly. The dual global/national approach pursued by these systems, including China, South Korea, Iran and India, is not always fully understood in papers on science. Nevertheless, China is now the number two science country in the world, the largest producer of papers and number one in parts of STEM physical sciences. The paper investigates the remarkable evolution of China’s science funding, output, discipline balance, internationalisation strategy and national and global networking. China has combined global activity and the local/national building of science in positive sum manner, on the ground of the nationally nested science system. The paper also discusses limits of the achievement, noting that while China-US relations have been instrumental in building science, a partial decoupling is occurring and the future is unclear.
Although geographical distance has become less relevant in co–authorship for monodisciplinary fields such as economics, mathematics, and physics, little is known about international collaboration in multidisciplinary fields such as higher education. This paper studies collaboration patterns in higher education research using the Scopus database with the application of the gravity model. The results show that the intensity of collaboration is negatively associated with geographical distance and positively associated with linguistic commonality but these findings differ significantly between various world regions. European scholars appear to give preference to linguistically proximate partners over geographical neighbours. Although English is the lingua franca in science, language is not a significant factor for the formation of collaboration for North American and Asian researchers. These findings have policy implications for fostering multidisciplinary research in international partnerships.
After the initial shock of the early months of the global COVID-19 pandemic, international collaboration in COVID-19 research continues to show aberrant patterns compared to coronavirus research in pre-COVID times. The most affected nations tend to produce the greatest number of coronavirus articles, with output closely coupled to the rate of infection. COVID-19 research has fewer nations and smaller teams than pre-COVID research, a trend which intensifies throughout the pandemic. The United States remains the single largest contributor to the global publication output, but contrary to China’s dominance in the initial months of the pandemic, China’s contribution falls as the national COVID-19 caseload drops. China-USA collaborations drop as the pandemic continues, perhaps due to China’s reduced rate of publication on the topic, and perhaps due to political obstacles, or a combination of these factors.
Acknowledgments: We are grateful to the constructive comments of Phillip Kim (the Editor) and three anonymous referees. Abstract This study aims to unravel the dynamic effect of geographic distance on startup-VC partnership performance by incorporating the possibility of accessibility improvement triggered by China's high-speed railway (HSR) during the partnership. We find that the negative effect of geographic distance is significantly weakened when HSR becomes available after the startup-VC partnership formation. We draw on the relational view to explore what types of geographically distant startup-VC partners can benefit more from HSR technology advancement. Results indicate that startup-VC partners that rely heavily on knowledge-sharing, have more complementary resources, or have more complex governance structures can better leverage the improved accessibility from HSR to transform the disadvantages of the long-distance to advantages.
Based on publications indexed in the Web of Science, the current study focused on internationally collaborated publications and publications acknowledging government funding of developing and developed countries including China, the US, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Brazil. Specific focus is placed on national funding agencies (i.e., focal agencies) supporting competitive research in science. The focal agencies of the six countries include the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the US National Science Foundation (NSF), German Research Foundation, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), National Research Foundation of South Africa (NRF), and National Council for Scientific and Technological Development of Brazil (CNPq). Results show that different countries vary in arrangement of government funding sources in support of competitive research projects. China and Brazil are centralized to the NSFC and CNPq, whereas the remaining four countries have relatively decentralized sources. The six focal national funding agencies of the current study are more efficient than non-focal agencies in raising citation impact, with the NWO, NSF, and NSFC perform better than non-focal agencies of corresponding countries. International collaboration improves citation impact, with the developing countries benefit more. Authorship (first or corresponding authorship) also plays a role in international collaboration. Collaboration led by authors from developed countries has a positive effect whereas that led by authors from developing countries usually have negative effects on citation impact. Interaction between funding and collaboration may have results different from those when these two factors are considered separately, which suggests being cautious while discussing effects of either of the two factors.
China’s rising in scientific research output is impressive. The academic community is curious about the time when the cross-over in the number of annual scientific publication production between China and the USA can happen. By using Web of Science Core Collection’s Science Citation Index Expanded database, this study finds that China still ranks the second in the production of SCI-indexed publications in 2019 but may leapfrog the USA to be the first in 2020 or 2021, if all document types are considered. Comparatively, China has already overtaken the USA and been the largest SCI-indexed original research article producer since 2018. However, China still lags behind the USA regarding the number of review paper production. In general, quantitative advantage does not equal quality or impact advantage. We think that the USA will continue to be the global scientific leader for a long time.
The last two decades have witnessed the rising prevalence of both co-publishing and retraction. Focusing on research collaboration, this paper utilizes a unique dataset to investigate factors contributing to retraction probability and elapsed time between publication and retraction. Data analysis reveals that the majority of retracted papers are multi-authored and that repeat offenders are collaboration prone. Yet, all things being equal, collaboration, in and of itself, does not increase the likelihood of producing flawed or fraudulent research, at least in the form of retraction. That holds for all retractions and also retractions due to falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism (FFP). The research also finds that publications with authors from elite universities are less likely to be retracted, which is particularly true for retractions due to FFP. China stands out with the fastest retracting speed compared to other countries. Possible explanations, limitations, and policy implications are also discussed.
The pattern and impact of scientific collaborations depends on a country’s or region’s development stage. Prior to promoting scientific collaborations, it is crucial to understand what types of collaboration are more beneficial. By taking the stage of regional scientific development into consideration, this paper investigates the effect of various collaborations on regional scientific output. Our results highlight the differences between collaboration effects across regions at various capability levels. Scientifically weak regions benefit from more concentrated collaboration, in particular with advanced domestic regions. However, scientifically strong regions can benefit from a centrally located position in a broader collaboration network. Findings from this analysis indicate that international collaborations might not be beneficial a priori. Whether or not one region benefits from international collaborations depends on this region’s local capacity. Being embedded in a broad network structure can help increase one region’s publication output. However, such benefit is limited only to regions that have relatively higher research capacity.
This study investigates the localization of collaboration in knowledge creation by using data on Japanese patent applications. Applying distance-based methods, we obtained the following results. First, collaborations are significantly localized at the 5% level with a localization range of approximately 100 km. Second, the localization of collaboration is observed in most technologies. Third, the extent of localization was stable from 1986 to 2005 despite extensive developments in information and communications technology that facilitate communication between remote organizations. Fourth, the extent of localization is substantially greater in inter-firm collaborations than in intra-firm collaborations. Furthermore, in inter-firm collaborations, the extent of localization is greater in collaborations with small firms. This result suggests that geographic proximity mitigates the firm-border effects on collaborations, especially for small firms.
Global collaboration continues to grow as a share of all scientific cooperation, measured as coauthorships of peer-reviewed, published papers. The percent of all scientific papers that are internationally coauthored has more than doubled in 20 years, and they account for all the growth in output among the scientifically advanced countries. Emerging countries, particularly China, have increased their participation in global science, in part by doubling their spending on R&D; they are increasingly likely to appear as partners on internationally coau-thored scientific papers. Given the growth of connections at the international level, it is helpful to examine the phenomenon as a communications network and to consider the network as a new organization on the world stage that adds to and complements national systems. When examined as interconnections across the globe over two decades, a global network has grown denser but not more clustered, meaning there are many more connections but they are not grouping into exclusive 'cliques'. This suggests that power relationships are not reproducing those of the political system. The network has features an open system, attracting productive scientists to participate in international projects. National governments could gain efficiencies and influence by developing policies and strategies designed to maximize network benefits—a model different from those designed for national systems.
Use these ten principles to guide research evaluation, urge Diana Hicks, Paul Wouters and colleagues. were introduced, such as InCites (using the Web of Science) and SciVal (using Scopus), as well as software to analyse individual citation profiles using Google Scholar (Publish or Perish, released in 2007). In 2005, Jorge Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, proposed the h-index, popularizing citation counting for individual researchers. Interest in the journal impact factor grew steadily after 1995 (see 'Impact-factor obsession'). Lately, metrics related to social usage advice on, good practice and interpretation. Before 2000, there was the Science Citation Index on CD-ROM from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), used by experts for specialist analyses. In 2002, Thomson Reuters launched an integrated web platform, making the Web of Science database widely accessible. Competing citation indices were created: Elsevier's Scopus (released in 2004) and Google Scholar (beta version released in 2004). Web-based tools to easily compare institutional research productivity and impact D
China's remarkable gains in science over the past 25 years have been well documented (e.g., Jin and Rousseau, 2005a; Zhou and Leydesdorff, 2006; Shelton & Foland, 2009) but it is less well known that China and the United States have become each other's top collaborating country. Science and technology has been a primary vehicle for growing the bilateral relationship between China and the United States since the opening of relations between the two countries in the late 1970s. During the 2000s, the scientific relationship between China and the United States--as measured in coauthored papers--showed significant growth. Chinese scientists claim first authorship much more frequently than U.S. counterparts by the end of the decade. The sustained rate of increase of collaboration with one other country is unprecedented on the U.S. side. Even growth in relations with eastern European nations does not match the growth in the relationship between China and the United States. Both countries can benefit from the relationship, but for the U.S., greater benefit would come from a more targeted strategy.
We investigate how geographic distance influences which firms engage each other in research and development (R&D) collaborations. Given advances in technology, geographic distance might not be expected to affect who partners with whom, yet recent research has reported on the localization of exchanges in numerous market settings. We identify factors that shape the degree to which geographic distance matters to alliance formation by considering the heterogeneity in adverse selection risk across exchange partners. Specifically, we argue that the effects of geographic distance depend on the extent to which partners are able to evaluate each others' resources and prospects. Empirical evidence from R&D collaborations in the semiconductor industry indicates that the likelihood of alliance formation is negatively related to geographic distance, even within clusters. The extent to which alliance formation falls off with geographic distance is diminished when the firms have prior ties, operate in the same product market, or possess similar technological knowledge.
In 2006 China had become the fifth leading nation in terms of its share of the world's scientific publications. Today it is second only to the United States. This achievement has been accomplished in part by a conscientious effort by the government to improve the research performance of China's universities through a series of programs, the most important of which is the 985 Project. This paper considers the effects of the 985 Project on increasing the rate of publication in international journals by researchers at 24 universities. Using the approach of linear mixed modeling, it was found that the rate of growth in publications by lower tier universities exceeded that of China's two most highly regarded universities after controlling for university R&D funding, university personnel size, and provincial per capita income. It was also found that the rate of growth of publications for universities as a whole increased more quickly after the implementation of the 985 Project.
Scientific novelty drives the efforts to invent new vaccines and solutions during the pandemic. First‐time collaboration and international collaboration are two pivotal channels to expand teams' search activities for a broader scope of resources required to address the global challenge, which might facilitate the generation of novel ideas. Our analysis of 98,981 coronavirus papers suggests that scientific novelty measured by the BioBERT model that is pretrained on 29 million PubMed articles, and first‐time collaboration increased after the outbreak of COVID‐19, and international collaboration witnessed a sudden decrease. During COVID‐19, papers with more first‐time collaboration were found to be more novel and international collaboration did not hamper novelty as it had done in the normal periods. The findings suggest the necessity of reaching out for distant resources and the importance of maintaining a collaborative scientific community beyond nationalism during a pandemic.
The pandemic and political tensions might slow the march towards more globalized science. The pandemic and political tensions might slow the march towards more globalized science.
Research policy often asks for international academic collaboration or collaborations between universities and other actors in society. To improve the understanding of such collaborations, a systematic analysis of academic–corporate co-publications was conducted, with a focus on the international dimension. Based on the global volume of publications in the Scopus database, one result is that academic–corporate co-publications enjoy a higher citation impact than other types of publications. Another result is that such co-publications are to a large extent internationally co-authored. Studies of ten countries and the ten plus ten largest academic and corporate institutions in these countries in terms of academic–corporate co-publications confirm these results and provide further details. Finally, the results indicate a positive correlation between the share of academic–corporate co-publications in a country and the innovation performance in indices such as the Global Innovation Index and the European Innovation Scoreboard. This study highlights the need to consider the numbers of co-authors and the high share of international co-publications when analyses are based on academic–corporate co-publications. Even though academic–corporate co-publications only reflect a small part of all academic–corporate collaborations, academic–corporate co-publications are shown to be useful as one of many potential tools to assess collaborations between academic and corporate actors and associated investments in research and innovation. It is also argued that the results of the study support policies promoting academic–corporate collaborations leading to co-publications.
We develop a simple theoretical framework for thinking about how geographic frictions, and in particular travel costs, shape scientists’ collaboration decisions and the types of projects that are developed locally versus over distance. We then take advantage of a quasi-experiment—the introduction of new routes by a low-cost airline—to test the predictions of the theory. Results show that travel costs constitute an important friction to collaboration: after a low-cost airline enters, the number of collaborations increases between 0.3 and 1.1 times, a result that is robust to multiple falsification tests and causal in nature. The reduction in geographic frictions is particularly beneficial for high-quality scientists that are otherwise embedded in worse local environments. Consistent with the theory, lower travel costs also endogenously change the types of projects scientists engage in at different levels of distance. After the shock, we observe an increase in higher-quality and novel projects, as well as projects that take advantage of complementary knowledge and skills between subfields, and that rely on specialized equipment. We test the generalizability of our findings from chemistry to a broader data set of scientific publications and to a different field where specialized equipment is less likely to be relevant, mathematics. Last, we discuss implications for the formation of collaborative research and development teams over distance.
This paper was accepted by Toby Stuart, entrepreneurship and innovation.
Conventional wisdom indicates that economic specialization can promote growth, whereas economic stability is associated with diversified economies. This conflicting relationship between specialization and diversity has been questioned, as regional scientists have suggested that specialization and diversity can coexist in a regional economy and proposed the concept of diversified specializations. To test this proposition empirically, two Herfindahl–Hirschman Indices were used to examine the relationship between economic diversity and economic performance among 359 metropolitan statistical areas in the contiguous United States. The first index measures industry diversity across 87 three-digit North American Industry Classification Systems sectors, and the second index quantifies cluster diversity among 51 economic specializations. This analysis confirms that cluster diversity contributes to both stability and growth, and regions can simultaneously pursue both high and stable economic growth.
High skilled workers gain from face to face interactions. If the skilled can move at higher speeds, then knowledge diffusion and idea spillovers are more likely to reach greater distances. This paper measures the knowledge creation consequences associated with the construction of China's high speed rail (HSR) network that connects mega cities, that feature the nation's best universities, to secondary cities. Since bullet trains reduce cross-city commute times, they reduce the cost of face-to-face interactions between skilled workers who work in different cities. Using a database listing research paper publication and citations, we document a complementarity effect between knowledge production and the transportation network. When connected by the HSR, co-author productivity rises, new co-author pairs emerge and more highly productive scientists migrate to the HSR cities.
This paper presents evidence that consumers underreact to taxes that are not salient and characterizes the welfare consequences of tax policies when agents make such optimization errors. The empirical evidence is based on two complementary strategies. First, we conducted an experiment at a grocery store posting tax inclusive prices for 750 products subject to sales tax for a three week period. Scanner data show that this intervention reduced demand for the treated products by 8 percent. Second, we find that state-level increases in excise taxes (which are included in posted prices) reduce alcohol consumption significantly more than increases in sales taxes (which are added at the register and are hence less salient). We develop simple, empirically implementable formulas for the incidence and efficiency costs of taxation that account for salience effects as well as other optimization errors. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the formulas imply that the economic incidence of a tax depends on its statutory incidence and that a tax can create deadweight loss even if it induces no change in demand. Our method of welfare analysis yields robust results because it does not require specification of a positive theory for why agents fail to optimize with respect to tax policies.
In the past few decades, there has been increasing interest in public-private collaboration, which has motivated lengthy discussion of the implications of collaboration in general, and co-authorship in particular, for the scientific impact of research. However, despite this strong interest in the topic, there is little systematic knowledge on the relation between public-private collaboration and citation impact. This paper examines the citation impact of papers involving public-private collaboration in comparison with academic research papers. We examine the role of a variety of factors, such as international collaboration, the number of co-authors, academic disciplines, and whether the research is mainly basic or applied. We first examine citation impact for a comprehensive dataset covering all Web of Science journal articles with at least one Danish author in the period 1995-2013. Thereafter, we examine whether citation impact for individual researchers differs when collaborating with industry compared to work only involving academic researchers, by looking at a fixed group of researchers that have both engaged in public-private collaborations and university-only publications. For national collaboration papers, we find no significant difference in citation impact for public-only and public-private collaborations. For international collaboration, we observe much higher citation impact for papers involving public-private collaboration.
InCites Essential Science Indicators is becoming increasingly used to identify top-performing research and evaluate the impact of institutes. Unfortunately, our study shows that ESI indicators, as well as other normalized citation indicators, have the following flaws. First, the publication month and the online-to-print delay affect a paper's probability of becoming a Highly Cited Paper (HCP). Papers published in the earlier months of the year are more likely to accumulate enough citation counts to rank at the top 1% compared with those published in later months of the year. Papers with longer online-to-print delays have an apparent advantage for being selected as HCPs. Research field normalizations lead to the third pitfall. Different research fields have different citation thresholds for HCPs, making research field classification important for a journal. In addition, the uniform thresholds for both articles and reviews in ESI affect the reliability of HCP selection because, on average, reviews tend to have higher citation rates than articles. ESI's selection of HCPs provides an intuitive feel for the problems of normalized citation impact indicators, such as those provided in InCites and SciVal.
Review papers tend to be cited more frequently than regular research articles. This fact, together with the continuous increase of the share of reviews in scientific literature, can have important consequences for the measurement of individuals' research output, usually based on citation analysis. However, studies evaluating the differences in citations of review papers compared to original research articles are almost non-existing in the literature. This paper presents a thorough analysis of the overcitation and overrepresentation of review papers in the most cited papers of the 35 largest subject categories in Science Citation Index-Expanded. Results indicate the average citations received by reviews depends largely on the research area considered, varying from 1.34 to 6.74 times the citations received by original research articles (average value is 2.95). Correlated with this overcitation, there is an important overrepresentation of reviews in the most cited papers, this overrepresentation being greater when the most highly cited papers are considered, i.e. 0.05% and 0.1% most cited papers, where the share of reviews have increased from 16 to 18% in 1990 to around 40% in 2010. Interestingly, the overcitation and overrepresentation in the most cited papers is more important in the areas with the lowest shares of reviews in total publications.
This paper offers an empirical investigation of the relationship between air transport service and trade, using a panel of 20 Italian regions and 24 European countries observed, half-yearly, over the period 1998–2010. We apply a Newey-West two-step GMM estimator to produce estimates which are robust to the presence of heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation. Our findings suggest that air transport service positively affects the export of Italian manufacturers and that full-service carriers are mainly responsible for this result.
As China is moving toward an innovation-driven economy, this paper offers new insights for both policymakers and investors to optimize the effectiveness of investment performance. This paper studies China's provincial research activities with a focus on the spillover-induced productivity and efficiency change. The results show that spillovers as a result of inflow of foreign investment contribute positively to the performance of overall research activities, however, the productivity effects vary across regions. Our analysis also indicates that highly skewed distribution of FDI leads to a less improved innovation efficiency in FDI-rich provinces. Future innovation policy should adjust the investment profiles based on the preferential innovation output on one hand, and optimize the complementary policy for FDI on the other hand to reduce inefficiency and the potential negative effects of knowledge spillovers. Inter-provincial governmental cooperation is necessary to resolve the uneven distribution of FDI and improve the innovation efficiency in both FDI-poor and rich regions.
Effects of direct flights on trade costs are investigated using micro price data at the city level. After controlling for local retail/distribution costs, traded input prices are obtained to be further used in the measurement of trade costs across cities through arbitrage conditions. The existence of a direct flight enters trade costs regressions negatively and significantly. The results are shown to be robust to the consideration of many control variables, nonlinearities in the effects of distance on trade costs, possible endogeneity of having direct flights between cities and alternative definitions of the data. The direct flights that are shown to be determined by bilateral air services agreements are further shown to reduce trade costs through an endogeneity analysis; the main policy implications are twofold: (i) international trade policies through aviation services, such as Open Skies Agreements of the US, are alternative trade policy tools to reduce international trade barriers; (ii) direct flights facilitate the integration of internal markets as in the case of European Union.
This paper examines a causal relationship between the flattening of a government hierarchy and economic performance by exploiting a panel data set on government reorganization in China from 1995 to 2012. Delayering has led to increases in revenue and inter-governmental transfers for county governments, but the associated enlarged span of control makes it difficult for upper-level governments to coordinate and monitor local ones. This has led to a reduction in county governments' total public expenditure and pro-growth expenditure, as well as an increase in land corruption. Overall, the flattening of the government hierarchy has a negative effect on economic performance.
In recent years, the relationship of collaboration among scientists and the citation impact of papers have been frequently investigated. Most of the studies show that the two variables are closely related: an increasing collaboration activity (measured in terms of number of authors, number of affiliations, and number of countries) is associated with an increased citation impact. However, it is not clear whether the increased citation impact is based on the higher quality of papers which profit from more than one scientist giving expert input or other (citation-specific) factors. Thus, the current study addresses this question by using two comprehensive datasets with publications (in the biomedical area) including quality assessments by experts (F1000Prime member scores) and citation data for the publications. The study is based on nearly 10,000 papers. Robust regression models are used to investigate the relationship between number of authors, number of affiliations, and number of countries, respectively, and citation impact - controlling for the papers' quality (measured by F1000Prime expert ratings). The results point out that the effect of collaboration activities on impact is largely independent of the papers' quality. The citation advantage is apparently not quality-related; citation specific factors (e.g. self-citations) seem to be important here.
While science is traditionally treated as a distinct domain of work organization, increasingly science is organized around larger and larger work groups that resemble small firms, with knowledge as the product. The growth of organized science raises the question of whether we also see a bureaucratic structuring of scientific work groups as predicted by organization theory, with implications for the academic credit system and scientific labor markets. Building on organization theory, we examine the relation between project group size, technical environment, and bureaucratic structuring of scientific work. Using survey data on scientific projects, we find size predicts bureaucratic structuring, with declining marginal effects. We also find that interdisciplinarity and task interdependence have distinct effects on bureaucratic structuring. Finally, the relationship between size and some dimensions of bureaucratic structuring is contingent on levels of work group interdependence in the field. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for policy debates about authorship and scientific careers.
Citation impact indicators nowadays play an important role in research
evaluation, and consequently these indicators have received a lot of attention
in the bibliometric and scientometric literature. This paper provides an
in-depth review of the literature on citation impact indicators. First, an
overview is given of the literature on bibliographic databases that can be used
to calculate citation impact indicators (Web of Science, Scopus, and Google
Scholar). Next, selected topics in the literature on citation impact indicators
are reviewed in detail. The first topic is the selection of publications and
citations to be included in the calculation of citation impact indicators. The
second topic is the normalization of citation impact indicators, in particular
normalization for field differences. Counting methods for dealing with
co-authored publications are the third topic, and citation impact indicators
for journals are the last topic. The paper concludes by offering some
recommendations for future research.
The role of direct flights in trade costs is investigated by introducing and using a micro price data set on 49 goods across 433 international cities covering 114 countries. It is shown that having at least one direct flight reduces trade costs by about 1,400 miles in distance equivalent terms, while an international border increases trade costs by about 14,907 miles; hence, the positive effects of having at least one direct flight between any two cities can compensate for about 10% of the negative effects of an average international border. Trade costs also decrease with the number of direct flights: on average, one direct flight reduces trade costs by about 305 miles in distance equivalent terms, which corresponds to 7% of the average distance and can compensate for about 2% of the negative effects of an average international border. The results are shown to be robust to the consideration of local distribution costs and alternative empirical strategies.
A single worker allocates her time among different projects which are progressively assigned. When the worker works on too many projects at the same time, the output rate decreases and completion time increases according to a law which we derive. We call this phenomenon "task juggling" and argue that it is pervasive in the workplace. We show that task juggling is a strategic substitute of worker effort. We then present a model where task juggling is the result of lobbying by clients, or coworkers, each seeking to get the worker to apply effort to his project ahead of the others'.
R&D spending is an important managerial choice. By making use of firm level panel data, this paper investigates the link between entry of foreign firms and R&D behaviour of domestic and foreign firms in China’s manufacturing sector. Empirical analysis, based on Tobit and Instrumental Variables Tobit regression, reveals that foreign entry increases the R&D spending of domestic firms but its impact on R&D spending of foreign firms is negative.
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CIKV4vzZqmnDfYqu9HGF/full
In recent years there has been a sharp increase in collaborations among scholars and there are studies on the effects of scientific collaboration on scholars’ performance. This study examines the hypothesis that geographically diverse scientific collaboration is associated with research impact. Here, the approach is differentiated from other studies by: (a) focusing on publications rather than researchers or institutes; (b) considering the geographical diversity of authors of each publication; (c) considering the average number of citations a publication receives per year (time-based normalization of citations) as a surrogate for its impact; and (d) not focusing on a specific country (developed or developing) or region. Analysis of the collected bibliometric data shows that a publication impact is significantly and positively associated with all related geographical collaboration indicators. But publication impact has a stronger association with the numbers of external collaborations at department and institution levels (inter-departmental and inter-institutional collaborations) compared to internal collaborations. Conversely, national collaboration correlates better with impact than international collaboration.
This article studies publication patterns in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in Flanders and Norway using two databases
that both cover all SSH peer-reviewed journal articles by university scholars for the period 2005–9. The coverage of journal
articles by the Web of Science (WoS) and the proportion of articles published in English are studied in detail applying the
same methodologies to both databases. The study of WoS coverage and language use is chosen because the performance-based funding
systems that are in place in both countries have given different emphasis to publishing in WoS covered journals. The results
show very similar, almost identical evolutions in the use of English as a publication language. The proportion of articles
covered by the WoS, however, is stable for Norway but has increased rapidly for Flanders. This finding shows that the parameters
used in a performance-based funding system may influence the publishing patterns of researchers.
Over the last two decades the scientific community has witnessed unprecedented growth of nanotechnology research in Canada. Although recent studies have shown that Canada consistently maintains a position in the first tier of productive countries in terms of its share of the world’s nano-publications, a number of key questions remain unanswered. Using a unique nano-related publication dataset, this paper combines bibliometric analysis and science overlay mapping to visualize the ‘invisible college’ of Canadian nano research. The present analysis finds that the rapid growth of nanotechnology research in Canada is, for the most part, externally driven. In recent years, research content has shifted toward nanobiotechnology fields. The geographical distribution of Canadian domestic nanotechnology research is characterized by regional imbalance: most research hubs are located near US–Canadian borders. Canadian nanotechnology scientists have collaborated with a variety of countries, but Chinese scholars in particular play a leading role in Canada’s research exchange across national borders.
The impact of international collaboration on research performance has been extensively explored over the past two decades. Most research, however, focuses on quantity and citation-based indicators. Using the turnover of keywords, this study develops an integrative approach, tracking and visualizing the shift of the research stream, and tests it within the context of U.S.–China collaboration in nanotechnology. The results show evidence in support of the linkage between the emergence of a new research stream of Chinese researchers when there is U.S.–China collaboration. We also find that the triggered research stream diffused further via extended coauthorship. Policy implications for science and technology development and resource allocation in the United States and China are discussed.
This paper explains …nancial contagion between two stock markets with uncorrelated fundamentals by uctuations in international investors'attention allocation. We model the process of attention allocation that underlies portfolio investment in international markets using investors who face information processing constraints. Investors optimally allocate more attention to a region hit by a …nancial crisis, to the detriment of other markets. The resulting endogenous increase in uncertainty causes a reduction in the capacity to bear risks by international investors that induces them to liquidate their positions in all risky assets. Hence, there is a collapse in stock prices around the world. We show that the degree of (non)anticipation of a crisis is crucial for the existence of contagion. Using data from the East Asian crisis and the number of news stories about Thailand in the Financial Times relative to news stories about Argentina, Brazil and Chile as a proxy for the relative attention allocated to the Asian stock market, we …nd evidence consistent with two key predictions of our model: …rst, the higher the return volatility of the originator market, the more relative attention allocated to this market; and, second, the more relative attention allocated to the originator market, the higher the return volatility of the other markets. Our …ndings support the attention reallocation channel as a transmission mechanism of …nancial crises between regions during the period from January 1997 to July 1998.
The Chinese government frequently threatens that meetings between its trading partners’ officials and the Dalai Lama will be met with animosity and ultimately harm trade ties with China. We run a gravity model of exports to China from 159 partner countries between 1991
and 2008 to test to which extent bilateral tensions affect trade with autocratic China. In order to account for the potential endogeneity of meetings with the Dalai Lama, the number of Tibet Support Groups and the travel pattern of the Tibetan leader are used as instruments.
Our empirical results support the idea that countries officially receiving the Dalai Lama at the highest political level are punished through a reduction of their exports to China. However, this ‘Dalai Lama Effect’ is only observed for the Hu Jintao era and not for earlier periods.
Furthermore, we find that this effect is mainly driven by reduced exports of machinery and transport equipment and that it disappears two years after a meeting took place.
Do political tensions harm economic relations? Theories claim that trade prevents war and political relations motivate trade, but less is known about whether smaller shifts in political relations impact economic exchange. Looking at two major economies, we show that negative events have not hurt U.S. or Japanese trade or investment flows. We then examine specific incidents of tensions in U.S.-French and Sino-Japanese relations over the past decade—two case pairs that allow us to compare varying levels of political tension given high existing economic interdependence and different alliance relations. Aggregate economic flows and high salience sectors like wine and autos are unaffected by the deterioration of political relations. In an era of globalization, actors lack incentives to link political and economic relations. We argue that sunk costs in existing trade and investment make governments, firms, and consumers unlikely to change their behavior in response to political disputes.