A Preliminary Investigation of Research Collaboration Through Scientific Paper Co-authorship in the Gulf of Mexico

It is well known that publications with collaborators from external institutions increase citations. This effect scales with spatial distance. There are also many barriers to long-distance collaborations, including linguistic differences, funding constraints, and the incremental costs of remote collaboration. This paper uses the Gulf of Mexico as a case study to examine long-distance research collaboration because it consists of three countries with diverse development levels and two prominent diplomatic languages, within a singular regional ecosystem of tremendous natural and economic value. This paper uses bibliometric network analysis to examine scientific research article co-authorship in the Gulf of Mexico from 2000 to 2018. The results reveal that, although inter-organizational co-authorship has increased, significant fragmentation exists between the U.S.A, Mexico, and Cuba. Large differences in technological and organizational proximity as well as research capacity between US and Mexican states in the Gulf of Mexico may make collaboration more difficult compared to other transboundary settings, such as the US-Canadian border. Centrally located organizations in the network, such as NOAA, have played a prominent role in cross-institutional research, suggesting a capacity to bridge political entities in the Gulf of Mexico.