HOTEL COSMOPOLITAN - A BIBLIOMETRIC STUDY OF COLLABORATION AT SOME EUROPEAN UNIVERSITIES

The collaborative pattern of all Nordic universities, as well as a few universities in the UK and the Netherlands, is analyzed using institu tionally cc-authored articles retrieved from science Citation Index.(T M) The study shows that there are no major differences between univers ities of various size when it comes to the proportion of articles with internal, national, or international co-authorships. There are some c ountry variations, but within each country, the differences among the universities are small, if any. When cc-authorships were fractionalize d according to the number of times a given university occurs among the addresses of an article, there were still no significant differences between universities of varying size. Since external collaboration, wh ether it is national or international, accounts for more than half of all articles produced by the universities, one is inclined to conclude that the universities function as a kind of cosmopolitan hotel housin g nodes of scientific networks that are becoming increasingly internat ional.