Openness and Impact of Leading Scientific Countries

TL;DR

This study investigates how international collaboration and researcher mobility influence the scientific impact of countries, revealing that greater openness correlates with higher research impact, with implications for science policy and investment.

Contribution

It develops a comprehensive openness index combining coauthorship, mobility, and R&D spending, providing new insights into the relationship between openness and scientific impact.

Findings

Openness strongly correlates with higher scientific impact.

International engagement enhances research quality and influence.

Policy implications for fostering openness to boost scientific progress.

Abstract

The rapid rise of international collaboration over the past three decades, demonstrated in coauthorship of scientific articles, raises the question of whether countries benefit from cooperative science and how this might be measured. We develop and compare measures to ask this question. For all source publications in 2013, we obtained from Elsevier national level full and fractional paper counts as well as accompanying field-weighted citation counts. Then we collected information from Elsevier on the percent of all internationally coauthored papers for each country, as well as Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development measures of the international mobility of the scientific workforce in 2013, and conducted a principle component analysis that produced an openness index. We added data from the OECD on government budget allocation on research and development for 2011 to tie in the public spending that contributed to the 2013 output. We found that openness among advanced science systems is strongly correlated with impact: the more internationally engaged a nation is in terms of coauthorships and researcher mobility, the higher the impact of scientific work. The results have important implications for policy making around investment, as well as the flows of students, researchers, and technical workers.