Adoption and diffusion of Frontier technologies: Tracing global collaborative research networks on ChatGPT

The successful adoption of Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) frontier technologies is crucial for corporate and national sustainability, with knowledge transfer playing a key role in this process. Indeed, past research has demonstrated that global collaboration networks can generate innovative ideas and customised solutions to key development challenges across locations. This study explores global collaborative research networks related to 4IR frontier technologies. Specifically, we leverage the recent launch of ‘ChatGPT’, as a quasi-experiment to analyse globally collaborative networks among researchers. To do this we utilise bibliometric data from the Web of Science (WOS) over the period January to November 2023, 1 year after the launch of ChatGPT and apply social network analysis (SNA) to identify key knowledge disseminators, gatekeepers and ‘bridgers’ at the country, institutional and researcher levels. Our findings highlight the prominent role of the United States, United Kingdom, China and India, but also the increasing dominance of emerging nations like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Malaysia indicating the importance of geographical and cultural proximity in these relationships. Prestigious institutions such as the National University of Singapore, Imperial College London and Stanford University are found to be central hubs focusing on AI, natural language processing and chatbots. We also find the emergence of regional hubs focusing on specialised areas of research related to ChatGPT in the areas of health, education, communications and linguistics. Our findings provide new insights into how collaborations between developed and emerging regions facilitate 4IR frontier technology adoption and suggest strategies to enhance these connections.