International collaboration in science: The case of India and China

The extent of international collaboration in science, as evidenced by inter nationally co-authored research publications, is on the rise. The lion's sh are of international collaboration takes place among the rich countries, es pecially the G7 nations. International collaboration among poorer countries and between rich and poor countries is rather limited. Based on data colle cted from the CD-ROM edition of Science Citation Index 1998, I compare inte rnational collaboration in science carried out in India and the People's Re public of China. To see them in perspective, I also present data on Israel and Japan. In the recent past, China has overtaken India in both the number of papers published and in the percent of internationally collaborated pap ers. Having at least one foreign author in over 39 percent of papers, Israe l is one of the leading international collaborators in science. Of the four countries, Japan has recorded the lowest percent of internationally collab orated papers, albeit on a very large base of publications. The leading col laborating countries with India, China and Israel are G7 countries, especia lly the USA, whereas China and South Korea are among Japan's top seven coll aborators. With all four countries, papers published in collaboration with advanced countries have appeared on average in journals with a higher impac t factor than papers published without such collaboration. In the case of J apan, papers published in collaboration with other G7 countries have appear ed in journals with impact factors higher than the average impact factor of all Japanese papers, but papers written in collaboration with South Korea and China have appeared in journals with lower impact factors. Papers resul ting from collaboration between these four countries and their major collab orators have been classified into specialties based on the journal titles.