Bibliometric Analysis Asia-Pacific Research Area ... - JuSER

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1.2 Co-Publications on a Country Basis
Figures 14 to 18 provide information on scientific co-publications between Germany or the USA
and the other countries studied. A co-publication is defined as a scientific publication which
includes address information (affiliation) for both Germany (or the USA) and the corresponding
country (or countries). The corresponding publication is then counted once for each of the
countries involved in the analyses that follow.
If we take the absolute values into consideration, most of the co-publications from Germany’s
perspective are written together with the USA. In 2007, they totalled more than 13,000. The
relative increase in relation to the reference year of 1998 is fairly low at 66 %. In contrast to this,
co-publications between Germany and China or South Korea tripled (see Figure 15(a)). Some of
the other countries achieved significantly higher growth rates, but in all of these cases, the
reference data from 1998 were relatively small. For example, co-publications between Germany
and Malaysia increased eighteen-fold, but they began with a mere four joint publications in 1998
(Figure 15(b)).
Co-publications Germany 1998-2007
Number of co-publications
1000
900
800
700
600
500
400
300
200
2000
1500
1000
500
Number of co-publications (Australia, China and Japan)
100
0
1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
New Zealand Taiwan South Korea Singapore Indonesia Thailand Vietnam
Malaysia Iran Australia China Japan
0
Figure 14: Development of co-publications from Germany’s perspective (excluding USA)
Figures 16 and 17 present the same aspect from the USA’s perspective. We can see that over
time, China pushes back other important co-publication partners, such as Japan, Australia and
South Korea. This is the only significant change revealed by Figure 16. This development is
closely related to the almost exponential publication development in China in general.
From Figure 17, we can see that the number of co-publications in the period 1998 to 2007 has
increased fivefold. It real terms, this represents an increase on a high level from 1,754 to 8,971
publications. The often high growth rates for co-publications with Vietnam or Iran are once again
based on relatively low reference data in 1998.
11