Suchergebnisse

Collaborations between China and the European Union (EU) member states involve not only connections between China and individual countries, but also interactions between the different EU member states, the latter of which is due also to the influence exerted by the EU's integration strategy. The complex linkages between China and the EU28, as well as among the 28 EU member states, are of great importance for studying knowledge flows. Using co-authorship analysis, this study explores the changes of the network structure between 2000 and 2014. Our results show that EU member states with middle- or low- scientific capacities, in particular those who joined the EU after 2000, have been actively reshaping the network of scientific collaborations with China. The linkages between middle- and low- scientific capacity countries have been tremendously strengthened in the later years. The network positional advantage (measured by the degree of betweenness centrality) has shifted from a few dominant nations to a wider range of countries. We also find that countries like Belgium, Sweden and Denmark are in important positions connecting the relatively low-capacity 'new' EU member states with China. The 'new' EU member states—that have relatively low scientific capacity—intend to cooperate with China jointly with 'old' EU member(s).

Public funding is believed to play an important role in the development of science and technology. However, whether public funding actually helps to increase scientific output (i.e. publications) remains a matter of debate. By analysing a dataset of co-publications between China and the EU and a dataset of joint project collaborations in European Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation (FP7 & H2020), we investigate whether different public funding agencies have different goals in their research policy. Our results support the hypotheses that funded research output represents the intentions of funding sponsors and a high level of public funding does not necessarily lead to high scientific output. Our results show that FP7/H2020 funded projects do not have a positive contribution to the output of joint publications between China and the EU. Interestingly, cooperation in the form of jointly writing proposals to these EU programmes, especially when they are not granted by the European Commission, can contribute significantly to joint scientific publications at a later stage. This applies in particular to cases where funding from China is involved. Our findings highlight the key role that funding agencies play in influencing research performance. While the Chinese government is interested in pursuing a high number of publications, the EU cares more about the social impact and indirect effect, which is hard to measure in the short term.