Modelling and measuring multilateral co-authorship in international scientific collaboration. Part II. A comparative study on the extent and change of international scientific collaboration links

The present study is focused on international collaboration in science, involving more than two countries. The authors developed a promising model to measure and analyse the extent of multilateral co-authorship links in a previous study. The model is based on a series expansion approach which relates a new indicator, the Multilateral Collaboration Index (rho), to the share of internationally co-authored papers (f). The model was found suitable to classify both the share of international papers, as well as the extent of multilateral links through the deviations from their expectations. A comparative analysis is made of changing collaboration patterns between 1983 and 1993 for 8 selected subfields, as well as all fields combined of the most active 38 countries. As expected an intensification of international scientific collaboration was observed, especially for a number of former COMECON countries. Different types of behaviour for different countries and science subfields emerged.