© ISTOCK.COM/PRAWNYThe Earth’s 195 sovereign states are becoming one scientific global village, where a scientist’s success depends on their willingness to carry out collaborative research with others from around the world. By the mid-1990s, scientific collaboration at institutional, national, and international levels, as indicated by coauthorship of published manuscripts, was doubling every 15 years. And by 2008, the number of internationally coauthored articles was increasing exponentially. In 2013, researchers from The Netherlands, the U.S., South Korea, and the U.K. constructed a global collaboration map that revealed international collaborations involving all the nations in the world and estimated that 25 percent of all scientific papers include authors from multiple countries.
Some international collaborations are complex and massive. For example, the etiologic agent of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) was identified with unprecedented speed in 2003 after the World Health Organization (WHO) assigned the task to a network of researchers from 11 laboratories in nine countries. The Human Genome Project involved the contributions of researchers at 20 institutions in six countries. While such large-scale projects take careful planning and coordination between international team members, analysis has shown that the more countries involved in a scientific collaboration, the greater its impact (J Am Soc Inf Sci Tec, 64:392-404, 2013). As Alice Gast, current president of Imperial College London, wrote in Scientific American in 2012: “While scientists become more specialized as they proceed through their studies, broadening and ...
