China And India:Bibliometric Study And Comparison Of International Collaboration In Science

With the rising of China and India, the literatures and conference about comparison of China and India are becoming more and more, with the topic concentrating on economy and society. Up to now, we have not found the comparison of China and India in term of international collaboration in science (in short ICS) across-the-aboard. ICS is an important reflection of the globalization in science. How to accelerate the development of the science by ICS and how to enhance scientific and technological innovation ability, especially original innovation capacity, are the issues that the governments must face. Thus studying Chinese and Indian ICS and comparing them is of academic and practical significance.International coauthored articles are main reflection of ICS, so the bibliometric analysis is mainly used to solve the problem of comparison of the Chinese and Indian ICS. The data was derived from Science Citation Index-Expanded and Essential Science Indicators of Thomson Reuters, the former span from 1978 to 2007 and the later from 1999 to 2007.Firstly, we perfect the bibliometrics indicators for ICS study, by which we investigate the situation of Chinese ICS and Indian ICS. By case studing and comparing, we discover the similarity and differentia between them, it reveals the good thing that we-centered consciousness is strengthening and the quality is advancing in Chinese ICS. At the same time, the finding reminds our nation must reinforce ICS, especially multilateral ICS. The results prove that bibliometric indicators is effective for researching Chinese and Indian ICS which provides the basis for the subject distribution and characteristics of the ICS below.With the development of multilateral scientific cooperation, ICS is increasingly showing the network characteristics. It is necessary to adopt the social network analysis in studying Chinese and Indian ICS. Firstly, we analyze the rationality of measuring collaborator's importance with degree centrality. Second, we define the core collaborator and the periphery collaborator and construct the parameter a expressing co-authorship percentage, P expressing co-authorship density and y expressing coauthored frequency percentage to reveal their "core-periphery" structure and its evolvement. In addition, we discover the cause for the formation of the structure. The concentration of Chinese collaborators is higher than India. China prefers to collaborate with Asia and Oceania, while India with Europe, South America and Africa. Results also show that Asian nations are becoming more and more important for Chinese and Indian ICS.Introducing the subject category by ESI, we analyze Chinese ICS and Indian ICS in discipline level from a new perspective. The results indicate that:First, the subject distribution of ICS is lack of uniformity in China and India. The emphasis is Physics, Chemistry, and Engineering one by one in China, while Physics and Chemistry are of equal importance in India. Material science is more and more important; Mathematics is less and less weaker. Second, China and India hold a dominant position in their bilateral collaboration in non-life science, and a subordinate status in other circumstance. China holds a dominant position in bilateral collaboration of Biology & Biochemistry, Environment/Ecology and Plant & Animal Science. India holds a dominant position in bilateral collaboration of Microbiology. Third, the co-authorship size in Chinese ICS is smaller than in Indian in all subjects in last decade. Fourth, the top 5 collaborators are developed country in most subjects in China and in a few subject they include emerging countries, while they are developed country in all subjects in Indian. Japan occupies the first collaborator of China in Material science. Fifth, Chinese international coauthored activity degree is higher than Indian in most of subjects in life science and vice verse in non-life science. Sixth, in term of high cited international coauthored articles, the quality of Chinese ICS is better than Indian excluding Physics, Clinical Medicine, Neuroscience & Behavior and Pharmacology & Toxicology. This category avoids the statistical fluctuations caused by more detailed category and statistical characteristics of fuzzy caused by thicker classifications. It shows that the subject category by ESI is appropriate to studing ICS.With the strengthening of collaboration between China and India, the non-symmetry of Sino-India co-authorship is showing. In their bilateral co-authorship, China occupies the dominant position in Biology & Biochemistry, Chemistry, Computer Science, Geosciences, Material Science, Molecular Biology & Genetics, Physics, and Plant & Animal Science. The Chinese position in Indian ICS is higher than the Indian Position in Chinese ICS with the gap enlarging. In their mega-lateral ICS, the two countries are the non-first authors.After summarizing the conclusions and analyzing the cause in meso-level, suggestions are given below about Chinese ICS:1) Government reinforces its function of leading our country's institutions to participate in and mastermind the multilateral and mega-lateral collaboration in science.2) Our country strengthen the collaboration with the under development countries when collaborating with the developed countries.3) Government carrying out the research on other countries' S&T policy in order to optimize the discipline structure of ICS.4) China promotes the collaboration with India to realize the rising of the two countries in science.