key: cord-0725721-n9i3eiim authors: Duan, Dezhong; Xia, Qifan title: Evolution of scientific collaboration on COVID‐19: A bibliometric analysis date: 2021-04-08 journal: Learn Publ DOI: 10.1002/leap.1382 sha: 9b730c8687558bd27a0d1fd89f818b676b9fd3be doc_id: 725721 cord_uid: n9i3eiim This paper considers the pattens of international collaboration by analysing publications on COVID‐19 published in the first 6 months of the pandemic. The data set comprised articles on COVID‐19 indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS CC) downloaded four times between 1 April 2020 and 1 June 2020. The analysis of 5,827 documents revealed that 128 countries, 23,127 authors, and 6,349 institutes published on the pandemic. The data reveal that the three main publishing countries were the USA, China, and England with Italy closely following. Although publication was widely spread, most of the institutions with the highest volume of output were in China. Network analysis showed growth in international cooperation with an average degree of country/region cooperation rising to 23.06 by 1 June. There was also a clear core‐periphery structure to international collaboration. Institutional collaboration was shown to be highly regionalized. The data reveal a high and growing incidence of international collaboration on the pandemic. Practice has long proved that international cooperation is not only the leading force in the global exploration of cutting-edge science but also the best way for the world to respond to issues such as resource and environment, climate change, health, and public safety (Adams, 2013; Adams & Loach, 2015; Choi et al., 2015; Freeman, 2010; Narin et al., 1991; Wagner et al., 2019) . It took only 6 months from the discovery of the Novel Coronavirus to more than 6 million confirmed cases and 300,000 deaths, which not only proves that the COVID-19 is too contagious to be overcome but also demonstrates the common destiny of all countries and regions in the era of globalization (Nature Editorial, 2020c; Washington, 2020) . In fact, when this outbreak was declared as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on 30 January 2020 by the WHO, it was already indicated that international cooperation is the key to combating this pandemic (Berkley, 2020; Duan et al., 2020; Nature Editorial, 2020a , 2020b Nature Medicine Editorial, 2020) . International scientific collaboration, an important part of international cooperation, has been given growing attention in innovation economics (Andersen, 2019; Bauder et al., 2018; Cassi et al., 2012 Cassi et al., , 2015 Gui et al., 2018a Gui et al., , 2018b Wuestman et al., 2019) , S&T policy (Chen et al., 2019; Fung & Wong, 2017; Gazni et al., 2012; Hou et al., 2008; Sun & Cao, 2020) , and knowledge production and technology transfer (Aldridge & globalization but also constantly re-shape the global scientific landscape (Adams, 2013; Adams & Loach, 2015; Royal Society, 2011) . International scientific collaboration is the key support of national competitiveness (Bathelt & Henn, 2014; Freeman, 2010) . In the era of pandemic, cooperation in virus research is and important win-win for participating countries/ regions. While improving the scientific research capacity, international cooperation also strengthens the capacity in pandemic prevention and control for each country and region (Nature Editorial, 2020c) . In the past 5 months, researchers around the world have conducted a large number of in-depth studies on the structural morphology, gene sequence, pathogenic mechanism, diffusion mode, etc. of the COVID-19 virus, giving us a gradually clearer understanding of the virus and how to prevent and control the epidemic (Corey et al., 2020; Guan et al., 2020; Tian et al., 2020; Wu et al., 2020; Zhu et al., 2020) . Within this are influential achievements jointly completed by researchers from multiple countries and institutions (Drew et al., 2020; Tian et al., 2020) . By exploring scientific collaboration among countries/regions and among institutes on COVID-19, this paper aims to answer the following two questions: (1) what is the structure of the international scientific collaboration network and the inter-institution collaboration network on COVID-19 research? (2) Who are the major contributing countries/regions and institutions participating in the scientific collaboration? The main contributions of this paper are twofold. Firstly, this paper seeks to enrich the literature on scientific collaboration through sorting out the relevant research about COVID-19. Specifically, it intends to test whether international scientific collaboration on COVID-19 is consistent with the existing findings on the structure of global scientific cooperation. It also tries to deepen our understanding of international collaboration in virus research. Although widely being criticized for its limitations (Cantner & Rake, 2014; Royal Society, 2011) , co-publication is still one of the best ways to characterize scientific collaboration between authors, between countries/regions or between organizations (Basu & Kumar, 2000; He, 2009; Lemarchand, 2012; Liu & Gui, 2016; Sun & Cao, 2020; Sun & Grimes, 2016) . The publications data analysed here was retrieved from Web of Science Core Collection (WoS CC), by adopting the full counting method (full credit to a country/institutes when at least one of the authors is from this country/institutes) to count the scientific collaborations among countries/regions or among institutes (Gauffriau & Larsen, 2005) . To clearly describe the development of scientific cooperation in the research of COVID-19, we counted all related publications (articles, reviews, letters and so on) collected on April 1, and collected new publications every half month thereafter. In this article, the bibliometric method is used to analyse the scientific cooperation on COVID-19. In the process, two kinds of software were used: VOSviewer and ArcGIS. VOSviewer is a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks which can be constructed based on citation, bibliographic coupling, co-citation, or co-authorship relations (Perianes-Rodriguez et al., 2016; . ESRI's ArcGIS is a geographic information system for processing maps and geographic information. Its ArcMap product can be used to display and analyse the geographic structure of the cooperative network among authors, institutions, cities, and countries Liu & Gui, 2016) . • The US, China, England, and Italy published the most articles on COVID-19 in the first 6 months, with the US overtaking China by June 2020. • International collaboration on articles about COVID-19 grew rapidly between April and June 2020. • Institutional collaborations on COVID-19 articles tend to be localized indicating close research networks. • Network analysis reveals a clear core-periphery structure of international collaboration on COVID-19 articles with growing participation of different countries. By integrating these two kinds of software, we analysed scientific cooperation around COVID-19 research both at national level and institute level. Specifically, we first used the VOSviewer to analyse the bibliographic data downloaded from WOS CC, drawing the scientific cooperation network among institutes or among countries/regions, obtaining the list of participating institutes or countries/regions, and the cooperation matrix between institutes or between countries/regions. Second, we used GPS Visualizer's Address Locator (www.gpsvisualizer.com/geocoder/) to geocode all participating institutes or countries/regions. Third, we imported the cooperation matrix with geographic information into ArcMap to analyse the geographical structure of scientific cooperation among institutes or among countries/regions. Network analysis is a powerful tool to reveal the structural characteristics of a scientific cooperation network . In this article, network analysis was applied to measure the structural characteristics of the scientific cooperation network on COVID-19. Specifically, the number of nodes and edges indicates the size of the network, that is, the number of countries/regions, institutes, or authors participating in cooperation. Density and average degree measure the cohesion of the network. The average clustering coefficient and the average path length are measures of the small world network (Watts & Strogatz, 1998) . In addition, we also applied block modelling in network analysis to study the core-peripheral structure of the international cooperation network on COVID-19. The significant core-peripheral characteristics of the world economic system have been widely proven (Nemeth & Smith, 1985; Smith & White, 1992) , and the core-peripheral structure of the global scientific cooperation network have also been discussed many times . We used the PAJEK program for block modelling , which is a program for network analysis and visualization. We are interested in the distribution of publications by countries/regions, institutes and authors, and the leading contributing economies and institutes participating in scientific cooperation on COVID-19. Table 1 Most of the countries/regions, institutes and authors involved in the research have cooperated with others to some degree. Despite the increasing number of countries/regions participating in the research, publications on COVID-19 were highly concentrated in a few countries/regions. China, the US, and England have consistently ranked among the top three in terms of (Table 4 ). This section traces network evolution on scientific cooperation around COVID-19 articles and analyses the countries/regions, According to at national-level and institute-level is a typically small-world network with higher clustering coefficients and shorter average path length compared with a random graph. Meanwhile, the international cooperation network on COVID-19 has an obvious core-periphery structure (Fig. 1) , which can be divided into four categories: core, strong semi-periphery, semi-periphery, and periphery (Nemeth & Smith, 1985; Smith & White, 1992; Wallerstein, 1974) . The international cooperation network on COVID-19 as of April 1 was a remarkable doublecore pyramid structure, only the US and China located in the core position. As of June 1, China moved down to the strong semiperiphery group, a single-core structure of the international cooperation network on COVID-19 led by the US has been taking shape. In the strong semi-periphery layer, from April 1 to June 1, except for the change in China, India rose from the semiperiphery to this level at May 1 but returned at June 1, Saudi Arabia fell to the semi-periphery at May 1 and remained its status at June 1. However, the number of countries or regions located in the strong semi-periphery is relatively stable. In the semiperiphery, the number of countries or regions increased significantly from 9 at April 1 to 40 at June 1. Surprisingly, countries with large numbers of publications were also located in this layer, such as Iran, Switzerland, Spain, Singapore, etc. Using the ArcMap platform, the international scientific cooperation on COVID-19 at three points in time, as shown in Fig. 2 The core-periphery structure of international cooperation network on COVID-19 at three points in time. relationship always existed between China and the US, increasing from 29 as of April 1 to 189 as of June 1. Note: "Partners" = number of countries (regions) they cooperated with, "Collaborations" = number of international collaborations. highest among institutional cooperation. An interesting phenomenon is that, contrary to international cooperation, cooperation on COVID-19 among institutes exhibits significant geographic proximity, that is, inter-institute cooperation on COVID-19 mostly occurred within the country or even within the city. Among the top 20 institutional partnerships as of June 1, there was only one transnational partnership (Table 9 ). At the time of writing, the COVID-19 pandemic is still ravaging the world. Tens of thousands of confirmed cases and thousands of deaths are confirmed and announced every day. More extensive and in-depth cooperation should be carried out on a global scale (Nature Editorial, 2020a , 2020b . This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive picture of scientific collaboration on COVID-19 research among countries/regions and among institutes within the first few months of the pandemic. The study included 5,827 papers about COVID-19 published by 6,349 institutions from 128 countries/regions. We admit that there are some shortcomings in this study. Firstly, we limited our data to the publications retrieved from the Web of Science. Although it is known for its huge amount of data (Cassi et al., 2012; Gui et al., 2018b; Leydesdorff & Wagner, 2008) , it is still limited in its inclusion. Secondly, although co-publications are widely accepted as proxies of scientific collaboration, as mentioned before, scientific cooperation does not necessarily lead to the publication of papers (Cantner & Rake, 2014; Royal Society, 2011) . Moreover, cooperation in publishing papers may only be a small aspect of scientific cooperation on COVID-19. Thirdly, this paper mainly focused on the cooperation, other bibliometric features are not involved, such as citation analysis, hotspot analysis, and community analysis. Through this bibliometric study, we found some interesting phenomena. First of all, scientific cooperation on COVID-19 has become more frequent. As of June 1, an increasing number of countries/regions, institutions, and researchers participated in scientific cooperation on COVID-19. The international scientific community generally recognizes that collaboration is the right way to work to overcome the epidemic and build a community of human health. Secondly, we discovered that the tri-polar pattern of international scientific cooperation controlled by North America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe is clearly portrayed in COVID-19 research. In these three regions, the US, China, England, Canada, Germany, India, and Australia are the core hubs of the international cooperation network for COVID-19 research. Particularly, the US is playing an increasingly important role in research and international cooperation on COVID-19, reflecting its status as a global scientific centre. Most countries/regions regard the US as the strongest scientific partner. Thirdly, China has played a vital role in the scientific research and cooperation on COVID-19, which is not only reflected in the number of published papers (Duan et al., 2020) but also in its extensive international cooperation (Mo & Zhou, 2020; Wu et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2020) . Fourth, China and the US were the closest partners in the current international scientific cooperation of COVID-19. Regardless of the current tense international relations between China and the US, in the face of the epidemic the institutions and researchers of the two countries still carried out close scientific cooperation. 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