Comments from John Daly

I will probably finish it over the weekend.I don't know whether you have seen this:http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews05_00978It seems to suggest that (Internet mediated) access to scientific publications leads researchers in developing nations to publish more themselves.I am trying to get my mind around the networking results that you present. Certainly the increases in coauthorship and international coauthorship are interesting and deserving of explanation. I think your ideas of self organizing networks of researchers are helpful and go a long way to explain the structure of the scientific communities that are forming. It seems to me that your rule for establishing a linkage might be adapted slightly. The question is whether the collaboration is worth the effort. Will the advantages obtained by entering the collaboration outweigh the costs and difficulties of the collaboration? The impact of improved communication and transportation systems is important in that respect. As the transaction costs go down and as do the delays, then collaborations with lesser gains become more attractive.Let me make a point that has interested me for some time. A scientist can choose to cooperate with a scientist in his country or abroad. Probably half the working scientists in the world were in the United States in 1950; now something like one-third of all working scientists living here. (I haven't looked it up.) That in itself makes it more likely that a U.S. scientist will collaborate with a foreign scientist in 2008 than in 1950. But for all the other 193 countries, their working scientists will face a greater ratio of foreign to domestic scientists. Therefore, I would expect, even were all other things equal, that the ratio of international to domestic collaborations would be higher in other countries than in the United States, (Of course, not everything is equal. It is easier for a scientist in a small country like Belgium, surrounded by other developed nations, to travel to another country than it is for an Ameerican scientist to cross the ocean to collaborate. The EU has established a lot of money to encourage cross-national European collaborations; developing country scientists often depend on collaborations with developed nation scientists to work at all, and are more likely to publish if involved in such collaborations.) Again, it was once the case that Americans accounted for half of all scientific publications, and now account for something like a third. If publications from foreign scientists, working in smaller scientific communities, are more likely to be internationally coauthored, then the higher percentage of foreign authored papers in the mix would account for an increase in international coauthorships in the total. I hope I have made the point clear. Have you been looking at the use of network analysis to identify core groups of research collaborators, surrounded by larger communities of practice, and still larger communities of interest?
John Daly