A study of seismology as a dynamic, distributed area of scientific research

TL;DR

This paper examines the internationalization and collaborative structures of seismology compared to geophysics, revealing that seismology has a more distributed core group of cooperating countries despite similar levels of international co-authorship.

Contribution

It provides a comparative bibliometric and social network analysis of seismology and geophysics, highlighting the evolving international collaboration patterns in seismology.

Findings

Seismology emerged as a distinct field from geophysics in the 1990s.

Seismology has a larger, more distributed core of cooperating countries.

The level of international co-authorship in seismology is not higher than in geophysics.

Abstract

Seismology has several features that suggest it is a highly internationalized field: the subject matter is global, the tools used to analyse seismic waves are dependent upon information technologies, and governments are interested in funding cooperative research. We explore whether an emerging field like seismology has a more internationalised structure than the older, related field of geophysics. Using aggregated journal-journal citations, we first show that, within the citing environment, seismology emerged from within geophysics as its own field in the 1990s. The bibliographic analysis, however, does not show that seismology is more internationalised than geophysics: in 2000, seismology had a lower percentage of all articles co-authored on an international basis. Nevertheless, social network analysis shows that the core group of cooperating countries within seismology is proportionately larger and more distributed than that within geophysics. While the latter exhibits an established network with a hierarchy, the formation of a field in terms of new partnership relations is ongoing in seismology.