Mapping world scientific collaboration: Authors, institutions, and countries

International collaboration is being heralded as the hallmark of contemporary scientific production. Yet little quantitative evidence has portrayed the landscape and trends of such collaboration. To this end, 14,000,000 documents indexed in Thomson Reuters's Web of Science (WoS) were studied to provide a state-of-the-art description of scientific collaborations across the world. The results indicate that the number of authors in the largest research teams have not significantly grown during the past decade; however, the number of smaller research teams has seen significant increases in growth. In terms of composition, the largest teams have become more diverse than the latter teams and tend more toward interinstitutional and international collaboration. Investigating the size of teams showed large variation between fields. Mapping scientific cooperation at the country level reveals that Western countries situated at the core of the map are extensively cooperating with each other. High-impact institutions are significantly more collaborative than others. This work should inform policy makers, administrators, and those interested in the progression of scientific collaboration. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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