Partners in discovery: international scientific collaboration

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Between 2003 and 2012 almost all Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries upped their international scientific collaboration, as measured by the proportion of scientific papers published with international co-authors. The US had the largest increase (33 per cent) of any country within the OECD. BRICS nations rose from 23 per cent to 30 per cent between 2003 and 2012, while Luxembourg had the largest proportion of internationally collaborated publications in 2012 (77 per cent), followed by Iceland (68.4 per cent) and Switzerland (63.5 per cent).

South Africa was the only BRICS country to experience a rise in the percentage of papers published with international collaboration, according to the OECD’s Trends Shaping Education 2016 report, with the largest drop (25 per cent) seen in Indonesia. Of the countries analysed, China had the lowest proportion of publications with other countries in 2012 (15.7 per cent).

ellie.bothwell@tesglobal.com