INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION IN SCIENCE - PARTICIPATION BY THE ASIAN GIANTS

Science in the last few years has become increasingly global and colla borative. The number of internationally coauthored papers has been inc reasing steadily. We have counted internationally jointly authored pap ers involving authors from the advanced countries and the Third World countries, using SCI 1991. We have looked at the number of papers resu lting from collaboration among authors residing in the countries of th e North (e.g. EC and OECD countries), authors residing in the South (e .g. India and Bangladesh, Mexico and Brazil, China and Pakistan) and p apers resulting from collaboration between authors residing in the cou ntries of the South and the North (e.g. India and UK, China and USA). Despite its late start, China has published many more collaborative pa pers with most Asian countries and the advanced countries of the West except the UK than India - confirming the effectiveness of the open do or policy of post-Mao China. Both India and China collaborate with USA much more often in physics than in other areas, followed by clinical medicine. However, India collaborates more with USA in chemistry than China. In Indo-US and Sino-US collaborations, collaborating institutio ns are mostly universities and institutes of higher learning in India and USA, whereas in China several institutions under the Academies als o take part. The percentage of collaborative papers involving authors from India is even smaller than the percentage of journal articles ori ginating from India. In general, papers resulting from international c ollaboration appear in better journals and are cited more often than p apers that are the outcome of local research.