A bibliometric investigation on China–UK collaboration in food and agriculture

Based on data from the Web of Science, international collaboration between China and the UK in food and agriculture has been investigated from various perspectives. A new method for classifying cross- or multi-disciplinary fields has been created. The comparative study focuses on China’s collaboration with selected countries including the USA, the UK, Germany and Japan. The newly proposed Integrated Impact Indicator (I3) is applied to evaluate publication impact. Although China’s total publications dropped in 2010, its research productivity in food and agriculture nevertheless kept growing and international collaboration, reflected by the number of publications, also increased in an exponential way. The growth rate of China’s internationally collaborated publications was lower than that of China’s total publications. The USA, Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK and Germany are the top partners for Chinese researchers in this field. China-UK joint publications overall increased although their share in China’s total internationally collaborated publications decreased. To China, collaborating with the USA, the UK and Germany, instead of Japan, seems to offer an option to raise impact. The rapidly growing number of international publications and impact of Chinese research in food and agriculture offers great collaboration potential for the country. The fact that the average impact of China-UK collaborative publications is higher than the domestic publications of either country implies that collaboration benefits both sides as has been found in several other studies.