ABSTRACT
The edge-bundling algorithm is applied to visualize the spatial evolution of the international scientific collaborative network, which is reshaping the global scientific landscape. Our analysis finds that as scientific research in the Asia-Pacific region has grown, especially in China, global scientific cooperation across the Eastern and Western hemispheres has greatly increased, thus extending the core axis of global scientific cooperation to the Western Pacific.
JEL:
Science is becoming a ‘globalization’ phenomenon (Royal Society, Citation2011). According to the Science and Engineering (S&E) Indicators 2020,Footnote1 the percentage of internationally co-authored S&E articles has risen from 14% in 2000 to 23% in 2018 (National Science Board, Citation2020), demonstrating that more than one-fifth of scientific papers come from global collaborations. Undoubtedly, the rise of international collaborative research is changing the global scientific landscape and shaping global scientific networks. However, the more international the scientific collaboration, the more complex the networks tend to be, which produces significant visual clutter in a map caused by large amounts of overlapping and intersecting edges among nodes. How to visualize it clearly has become a sticking point for correctly recognizing the spatial evolution of the global scientific collaborative networks.
This graphic applies the edge-bundling algorithm to map the global scientific networks and enable us to interpret network information visually. The edge-bundling algorithm is an edge cluster method that can reduce visual clutter caused by chaotic network connections. Specifically, similar edges in a network are clustered into common edges or bundles by routing close to each other (Ersoy et al., Citation2011). Although the edge-bundling algorithm has been much discussed in visualization and computer graphics, it is rarely used in geographical research (Hennemann et al., Citation2015). This study used Tulip software to map the graph of the global scientific collaboration networks in 2000 and 2015. Our bibliographical data come from the Web of Science database, which is widely accepted for research on regional scientific collaborative networks (Gui et al., Citation2019).
As shown in , over the past 15 years the core axis of the global scientific collaborative networks has extended from being primarily transatlantic to including the Western Pacific region. In 2000, the network was dominated by Europe and North America and formed the transatlantic axis. The top scientific collaborations in the network mainly existed in the transatlantic region and included the United States–Germany, the United States–UK, the United States–France, the United States–Italy, and others. In 2015, as scientific research in the Asia-Pacific region has risen, researchers have established close scientific partnerships with scientists in North America as well as Europe. The extension of global scientific collaboration across Eastern and Western hemispheres has greatly increased. China's growth in international scientific collaboration was the most obvious and it has become the fifth largest global scientific cooperation superpower. At the same time, US–China collaborations have become the world's largest research partnership, with 37,802 internationally co-authored papers. These indications suggest that the core axis of the global collaborative network has shifted from West to East, a trend that is consistent with the changing tides of the world economy (Quah, Citation2011).
Figure 1. Spatial evolution of the global scientific collaborative networks, 2000 and 2015.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Notes
1 Science and Engineering Indicators, a biennial report to Congress from the National Science Board (2020), covers detailed information about international science and engineering.
References
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