Growth patterns of the network of international collaboration in science

Abstract

International knowledge flows might be eroding national borders of innovation systems and contributing for the emergence of an international system of innovation. This paper investigates how far the scientific international collaboration has developed and how stable the structure of those collaborations is, evaluating the properties of those networks and their long term behaviour. The data collected and analyzed show that international collaboration has been growing with a peculiar pattern—faster than an exponential growth-, shaping a scale-free network that has preserved its structure while it grows. This paper analyses the properties of this network and the implications of those properties for an emerging global innovation system in terms of growth, hierarchy, opportunity, challenges, and robustness and for the generation and transfer of technology.