Collaboration benefits and international visibility of two-country-collaborations

Abstract

We introduce two novel ways to capture the impact benefits two countries receive from collaborations. For both indicators we compare the value of a specific collaboration with the value of average collaborations for each of the countries. As we restrict our analysis to only two-country collaborations and calculate the values for each scientific field individually, many of the problems introduced by former attempts of collaboration indicators dissipate. Additional to a mean based indicator (Citation Benefit) we introduce an International Citation Share indicator that measures the share of international citations on an item basis. By aggregating and correlating these indicators we show that two different factors of collaboration return, highly cited publications and a general domestic/international bias, i.e. the tendency of a publication to be cited more in the originating country, can be measured exclusively by these two indicators. These approaches open up the field to a new kind of deep analysis of scientific collaborations. (author's abstract)