The Diffusion of the Internet and the Increased Propensity of Teams to Transcend Institutional and National Borders

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between exposure to the Internet and changes in collaboration patterns across institutional and national borders. The number of years that have elapsed since an institution's adoption of a domain name (DNS) is used as a proxy for Internet exposure. This proxy is then matched with institutional data on all published papers indexed by ISI for over 1,200 US four-year colleges, universities and medical schools for the years 1991-2007. The publication data examined cover the social sciences and natural sciences and narrower fields such as economics and biology. Two measures of institutional collaboration are examined: (1) percent of papers produced by a US institution with one or more coauthors at another us institution (US-US); and (2) percent of papers produced by a US institution with one or more non-US coauthors (US-INTL). Results indicate dramatic growth in the percentage of both US-US and US-INTL collaborations, as well as important differences by field. The study provides modest evidence that length of exposure to the Internet has had a positive and significant effect on both US-US and US-INTL collaborations.