Sino-South Korean Scientific Collaboration Based On Co-Authored SCI Papers

Using statistic and bibliometric methods to characterize scientific cooperation between China (excluding Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan) and South Korea through their bilateral co-authored papers covered by the Science Citation Index CD-ROM, 1991-2010, in our paper we exploit the feature of their cooperation in four levels: time sequence, academic community, key fields, and institution distribution. From the time sequence we know that collaboration between China and Korea starts in 1991, reaching the first peak during 2004-2007. As for the academic community, the number of Chinese corresponding authors (2414) is slightly lower than that of Korea (2700). Regarding the 27 high yield authors, there are only 4 coming from China. Korea has a higher active level than Chinese authors. China and Korea tend to cooperate with each other on strong disciplines such as physics, chemistry, material science, engineering, mathematics, pharmaceutical, computer science and biology. Furthermore, they also attach great importance to basic research and high-tech cooperation. Besides, Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks at the top 1 among the distribution of institutions. As a majority of the collaborative institutions are universities, the participation of non-university institutions is relatively low. There are 7 Korean universities among the top ten institutions, while Yanbian University and Tsinghua University in China rank respectively as third and fourth. Seoul National University, accompanied by Korea University and Yonsei University as the three top Korean universities, is also among the top among the cooperating institutions.