MODELING AND MEASURING MULTILATERAL CO-AUTHORSHIP IN INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC COLLABORATION - PART-II - A COMPARATIVE-STUDY ON THE EXTENT AND CHANGE OF INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC COLLABORATION LINKS

The present study is focused on international collaboration in science , involving more than two countries. The authors developed a promising model to measure and analyse the extent of multilateral co-authorship links in a previous study. The model is based on a series expansion a pproach which relates a new indicator, the Multilateral Collaboration Index (rho), to the share of internationally co-authored papers (f). T he model was found suitable to classify both the share of internationa l papers, as well as the extent of multilateral links through the devi ations from their expectations. A comparative analysis is made of chan ging collaboration patterns between 1983 and 1993 for 8 selected subfi elds, as well as all fields combined of the most active 38 countries. As expected an intensification of international scientific collaborati on was observed, especially for a number of former COMECON countries. Different types of behaviour for different countries and science subfi elds emerged.