Collaboration through co-authorship is a long studied field of work in scientometrics. The notion of international collaboration has been widely acknowledged through bibliometric data as a positive factor to improve the citation impact and visibility of publications. What is more, the share of international collaboration is an indicator of success used in many evaluation exercises at the individual level (e.g., Ramón y Cajal in Spain) and it is included in the set of indicators pre-calculated in many bibliometric suites such as Clarivate’s InCites.

At the country level, international collaboration can be seen as a way of bridging with other countries or belonging to the global community. However, little is known on the mechanisms that lead to this or the type of collaboration needed to do so. With regard to developing research systems, international collaboration can serve as a means to increase investment and capacity building^1,2. Still, is international collaboration good no matter with whom or how many. Can we observe differences in terms of fields or type of development depending on the partners countries collaborate with?

My colleagues and I have recently got accepted a paper³ at the Globelics Conference 2017 in which we explore types of international collaborating partners for selected countries in South-East Asia. We part from the concepts of multilateral and bilateral collaboration developed by Glänzel and de Lange^4,5 to analyze the international collaboration trend of six leading science systems among the ASEAN group of countries (Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia). While the analysis is yet very preliminary, we do observe differences on the major partners and fields of these countries depending on the type of multi or bilateral collaboration they have with the country. We also find different temporal trends on the evolution of international collaboration between these six countries, suggesting different developing stages of their national system. We hope to explore and expand these analyses in the future.

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