Research collaboration and its impact on the field of climate change

This study conducted network analysis of 43,393 climate change-related articles published in SCIE from 1984 to 2023 to analyze the structures of research collaborations and assess the impacts of these collaborations on the quality of research. The United States plays a central role in climate change research, with countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and China also making important contributions to the research collaboration network. Key hubs of institutional collaboration include the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the University of California, France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), and the Helmholtz Association, all of which display high network centrality. Institutional collaboration structures are characterized by a mix of global and national clusters, with global clusters dominated by institutions in Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Spain, and the United States, while national clusters are predominant in high productivity countries such as the United States, France, China, and Australia. Multinational and multi-institutional collaborations also outperformed single-country and single-institution research across all scales of research impact. In particular, multinational research collaborations show Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) scores that are approximately 30% higher, while Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is around 35% higher than single-country research. Furthermore, increases in the number of collaborating countries and institutions tend to result in higher research impact. This finding suggests that the diversity of countries and institutions involved in a study contributes positively to the quality of the research.