TY - JOUR AU - Freeman, Richard B AU - Ganguli, Ina AU - Murciano-Goroff, Raviv TI - Why and Wherefore of Increased Scientific Collaboration JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 19819 PY - 2014 Y2 - January 2014 DO - 10.3386/w19819 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19819 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19819.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Richard B. Freeman NBER 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/868-3900 Fax: 617/868-2742 E-Mail: freeman@nber.org Ina Ganguli Department of Economics Crotty Hall 304 412 N. Pleasant Street University of Massachusetts Amherst Amherst, MA 01002 Tel: 413-545-6230 Fax: 413- 545-2921 E-Mail: iganguli@econs.umass.edu Raviv Murciano-Goroff Boston University Questrom School of Business 595 Commonwealth Ave Boston, MA 02215 USA Tel: 617-353-4510 E-Mail: ravivmg@post.harvard.edu M1 - published as Richard B. Freeman, Ina Ganguli, Raviv Murciano-Goroff. "Why and Wherefore of Increased Scientific Collaboration," in Adam B. Jaffe and Benjamin F. Jones, editors, "The Changing Frontier: Rethinking Science and Innovation Policy" University of Chicago Press (2015) M3 - presented at "The Changing Frontier:", August 2-3, 2013 AB - This paper examines international and domestic collaborations using data from an original survey of corresponding authors and Web of Science data of articles that had at least one US coauthor in the fields of Particle and Field Physics, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, and Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology. The data allow us to investigate the connections among coauthors and the views of corresponding authors about the collaboration. We have four main findings. First, we find that US collaborations have increased across US cities as well as across international borders, with the nature of collaborations across cities resembling that across countries. Second, face-to-face meetings are important in collaborations: most collaborators first met working in the same institution and communicate often through meetings with coauthors from distant locations. Third, the main reason for most collaborations is to combine the specialized knowledge and skills of coauthors, but there are substantial differences in the mode of collaborations between small lab-based science and big science, where international collaborations are more prevalent. Fourth, for biotech, we find that citations to international papers are higher compared to papers with domestic collaborators only, but not for the other two fields. Moreover, in all three fields, papers with the same number of coauthors had lower citations if they were international collaborations. Overall, our findings suggest that all collaborations are best viewed from a framework of collaborations across space broadly, rather than in terms of international as opposed to domestic collaborative activity. ER -