ABSTRACT
The world may be flattening due to forces of globalization (Friedman, 2007), but a tilt is emerging in the conduct of scientific research around the world. Research has, for many decades, been dominated by the United States and Europe. While these countries remain dominant, the trend is changing. Rapidly emerging economies, particularly in Asia, are increasingly the producers of scientific research. Governments in a number of these rapidly emerging economies are investing heavily in building research capacity. As the research enterprise has broadened to a wider set of countries, cross-border collaboration has expanded. Such collaborations are motivated by opportunities to tap multiple sources of funding, spread financial risk, and sustain working relationships among researchers. In some cases, research has moved abroad in response to government regulatory policies (Senker, Enzing, & Reiss, 2008). For example, restrictions on stem-cell research during the Bush presidency in the United States led some companies to move their research in this area to other countries. International collaborations are facilitated by the increased simplicity and low cost of communication and the ease with which multi-national corporations can direct their research funds to take advantage of favorable economic and legal contexts. This chapter characterizes the nature of current cross-national research collaborations from the perspective of national variation. It reviews changes now underway in the manner and extent to which scientific research is being pursued across countries. To that end, it presents an overview of the size of, and emerging trends in, the research and development (R&D) endeavor across countries, the distribution of research funds across sectors and institutions, and the growth of cross-national collaboration in research. The central argument is that four trends are currently shaping cross-national research collaboration. First, aggregate funding for scientific research has grown rapidly over the last decade. Second, funding patterns reflect a shift away from those countries that have previously dominated, toward newly emerging economies. Third, across virtually all countries, most funding for scientific research is provided by private companies with governments playing a
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secondary, though still important, role. Finally, the shifting patterns in where and how research is being conducted have implications for cross-national research collaboration.
