Analysis of China and ASEAN Scientific Research Cooperation

Status based on Bibliometrics Methods

Duanwu Yan

1 a

, Shuang Lv

1 b

, Yue Chen

1 c

, and Biao Ma

1, 2 d

School of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

Internet Network Information Center, Jiangsu Provincial Education Examination Authority, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

Keywords: China-ASEAN, Scientifice Research Cooperation, Bibliometric, Co-authored Paper, Scientific Research

Output.

Abstract: At the beginning of the 14th Five-Year Plan, China will continue to promote the high-quality development of

The Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21-Century Maritime Silk Road. Moreover, ASEAN, the core area of

China's " the Belt and Road ", is a vital partner for China in scientific research. This paper uses Web of Science

as the data source and selects the co-authored papers as the research object, and analyzes the scientific research

cooperation between China and ASEAN from the perspectives of institutions, fields, countries, and

cooperation patterns in the 12th and 13th Five-Year Plan periods. The study found that the total scale of co-

authored papers has been increasing year by year, the level of scientific research output varies significantly

among different countries, most of the participating institutions are universities and research institutes in

different countries, and most of the cooperation fields focus on the good disciplines and particular fields of

each country.

1 INTRODUCTION

After entering the 21st century, China's international

science and technology exchanges and scientific

research cooperation have also become more

frequent. They increasingly play an essential role

(Zhou, 2009), and more and more scholars have

begun to pay attention to the progress and

characteristics of China's international scientific

research cooperation. In 2013, President Xi Jinping

put forward the development concept of "One Belt

and One Road" when he attended Central Asia and

Southeast Asia. And in 2015, China officially

released the "Vision and Action for Promoting the

Construction of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the

21st Century Maritime Silk Road" guide. All of this

shows that China, as a developing economic power,

has taken the initiative to build a framework for

cooperation and wants to work together with

neighboring countries to seek progress. ASEAN is

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9893-2302

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3613-9990

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4316-4868

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0937-5602

China's "Belt and Road" construction (Li, 2015).

Under the leadership of "One Belt, One Road", the

ties between China and ASEAN countries have

become closer and closer.

Some scholars have long studied the issue of

scientific and technological cooperation between

China and ASEAN countries. From a disciplinary

perspective, most studies focus on the collaboration

between China and ASEAN in agriculture (Wang,

2015)

oceanography (Tian, 2016), etc. From a

regional perspective, some scholars have studied the

cooperation between Chinese provinces and ASEAN,

such as Guangxi (Cao, 2015) and Yunnan (Luo,

2019). However, most studies on the status of China-

ASEAN research cooperation are often included in

the analysis of the level of science and technology

cooperation in countries along "the Belt and Road".

This research conducts a bibliometric analysis based

on the co-authored papers between China and

ASEAN countries since the 12th and 13th Five-Year

Plan periods. Through the detection of co-authored

158

Yan, D., Lv, S., Chen, Y. and Ma, B.

Analysis of China and ASEAN Scientiﬁc Research Cooperation Status based on Bibliometrics Methods.

DOI: 10.5220/0011344400003437

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Public Management and Big Data Analysis (PMBDA 2021), pages 158-163

ISBN: 978-989-758-589-0

articles, quantitatively analyzes the research

cooperation situation between China and ASEAN and

reveals, to a certain extent, the development of

research cooperation between China and ASEAN

countries.

2 MATERIALS AND METHODS

In this paper, we use co-authored papers from any of

the ASEAN countries as the research object in the

Web of Science core collection, and use the country

field (CU) to conduct an advanced search for articles

of type Article, spanning 2011-2020, covering the

entire 12th and 13th Five-Year Plan periods, and

published in English.

Some co-authored papers contain only one

ASEAN country in the obtained data. Even if the CU

field contains countries not in ASEAN countries, they

are regarded as bilateral co-authored papers between

China and ASEAN countries; when more than one

ASEAN country appears in the CU field, they are

defined as multilateral co-authored papers between

China and ASEAN countries. We use metrological

software such as VOSviewer and CiteSpace, to grasp

the overall dynamics of research cooperation between

China and ten ASEAN countries over the past decade

in general.

3 RESULTS & DISCUSSION

3.1 General Information on

China-ASEAN Scientific Research

Cooperation

Currently, ASEAN mainly includes ten countries,

namely Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos,

Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore,

Thailand, and Vietnam, whose basic information is

summarized in Table 1.

During 2011-2020, there were 50,151 scientific

papers co-authored by China and ten ASEAN

countries, from 2084 in 2011 to 9914 in 2020, an

increase of 3.76 times, and the annual number of

articles published has maintained a linear growth

(Figure 1). Among them, the number of publications

in the 13th Five-Year Plan period increased 125.47%

compared with that in the 12th Five-Year Plan period.

Looking at the annual growth rate of the number of

articles issued, we can see that 2013 and 2019 are the

two years with significant growth of 24.5% and

24.35%, respectively.

Figure 1: The number and growth rate of co-authored papers between China and ASEAN countries (2011-2020).

Although the overall scale of scientific research

co-authored papers between China and ASEAN

countries shows a year-on-year increase, the

proportion of co-authored articles between China and

ASEAN countries was only 5.77%, indicating that

ASEAN has not yet become a key cooperation target

for international scientific research cooperation in

China.

Figure 2 shows the comparison between the

economic power of the ten ASEAN countries and the

number of co-authored papers. From the two

discounted trends, we can easily see that the size of

co-authored papers between China and ASEAN

countries is uneven. Their data performance is not

entirely consistent with the trend of economic power,

so we infer that economic power may not be the

dominant factor affecting research cooperation.

Analysis of China and ASEAN Scientiﬁc Research Cooperation Status based on Bibliometrics Methods

159

Figure 2: The economic strength and number of co-authored papers of ASEAN countries (2011-2020).

The highest point of the green dash is positioned

in Singapore. In other words, the closest scientific

research cooperation country with China in

Singapore, accounting for 61.87% of the total

number, which is nearly five times the amount of co-

authored papers of Malaysia, which is in the second

place. In contrast, the scientific cooperation between

China and Laos is relatively small, with only 148 co-

authored papers between 2011 and 2020.

Table 1: Basic Informations of ASEAN Countries.

Country codes Country GDP/billion dollars papers co-authored papers

MYS Malaysia

3366.64 226729 10596

SGP Singapore

3399.98 211842 52468

THA Thailand

5017.95 140262 9418

IDN Indonesia

10600 133582 2504

VNM Vietnam

2711.58 64310 5851

PHL Philippines

3614.89 26681 2421

MMR Myanmar

761.86 3624 629

BRN Brunei

120.16 3222 384

KHM Cambodia

252.91 3767 383

LAO Laos

191.36 2258 148

3.2 Analysis of China-ASEAN Scientific

Research Cooperation Institutions

From high to low, the top 10 participating institutions

are the National University of Singapore, Nanyang

Technological University, Chinese Academy of

Sciences, A*STAR, Zhejiang University, University

of Malaysia, University of Hong Kong. Shanghai Jiao

Tong University, The Chinese University of Hong

Kong, and Peking University, respectively. Most of

them are universities and research institutes in

various countries.

Figure 3: The institutional cooperation network for co-authored papers between China and ASEAN (2011-2020).

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Figure 3 shows the cooperative network of China-

ASEAN co-authored papers participating institutions

from 2011 to 2020. The larger the node, the higher the

frequency of participation. Among the 74 institutions

that entered the statistical ranks, there are also

research institutions from the United States, Italy, and

the United Kingdom, indicating that other countries

also play a role in China-ASEAN research

cooperation.

3.3 Analysis of China-ASEAN Scientific

Research Cooperation Fields

According to the classification in Web of Science,

there are 131 research fields in China and ASEAN

countries (Figure 4), and the top ten research fields

and their data are listed in Table 2. Since the China-

ASEAN Science and Technology Partnership launch

in 2012, China and ASEAN countries have been

cooperating in 10 required technical fields, including

engineering and materials science.

The cooperation between China and Singapore is

mainly in the field of materials science, with a total

of 3042 co-authored papers, and two institutions, the

Chinese Academy of Sciences and Nanyang

Technological University, have the highest frequency

of cooperation in this field (Figure 4); meanwhile,

these two institutions have also produced many

scientific results in the field of applied physics.

Physics, as a fundamental discipline, is a crucial area

of cooperation between China and ASEAN countries,

with a high output of co-authored papers in applied

physics, particle and field physics, astrophysics and

astrophysics, and interdisciplinary physics. For

example, in Singapore, a country with a high level of

economic and technological development, most of

the papers co-authored by China focus on

interdisciplinary materials science and electrical and

electronic engineering; In contrast, some countries

have more research on the natural environment and

biological resources, for example, Vietnam has more

co-authored papers on environmental science,

Thailand has more co-authored papers on mycology

and plant science.

Table 2: Top 10 research fields of co-authored papers

between China and ASEAN (2011-2020).

Research fields

ape

ercentage

ineerin

11498 22.9%

Chemistr

8439 16.8%

sics 8403 16.8%

Materials Science 7907 15.8%

Materials Science,

Multidisciplinary

6737 13.4%

Science & Technology-

Other to

ics

6545 13.1%

Engineering, Electrical &

Electronic

5611 11.2%

Computer Science 5314 10.6%

sics, A

lie

4486 8.9%

Chemistry, Physical 4223 8.4%

Figure 4: Primary research fields of co-authored papers

between China and ASEAN (2011-2020).

3.4 The Research Cooperation Network

between China and ASEAN

In order to more accurately reflect the overall

dynamics of China-ASEAN countries' research

cooperation, we use VOSviewer and social network

analysis theory to analyze the China-ASEAN

research cooperation network from 2011 to 2020. we

set the minimum frequency of co-authored papers to

100 and plotted Figure 5, in which the network

includes a total of 67 countries, including the United

States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, in

addition to China and the ten ASEAN countries. It

can be seen that the scientific cooperation within

ASEAN countries is much less than that with the

outside. Apart from China and the US, ASEAN

countries tend to cooperate more with European

countries, connecting more with the UK, Germany,

etc. This is partly related to the economic and

scientific strength of European countries in the world

and partly perhaps related to the establishment of the

ASEA-UNINET organization. Meanwhile, some

economically and technologically advanced countries

are also the focus of cooperation among ASEAN

countries, such as Japan, Korea, and Australia (Table

3). In addition, ASEAN countries also collaborate

with countries with research expertise in certain

fields, such as India and Brazil.

Analysis of China and ASEAN Scientiﬁc Research Cooperation Status based on Bibliometrics Methods

161

Figure 5: All country cooperation networks in co-authored

papers (2011-2020).

It is easy to see that Singapore is the pivot of the

ASEAN research cooperation network, and China is

its key cooperation target. Thailand, Malaysia, the

Philippines, and Indonesia frequently cooperate

within ASEAN, while Myanmar, Cambodia, Brunei,

and Laos are relatively weak in scientific research,

and the number of cooperation with both internal and

external ASEAN countries is low.

Table 3: TOP 10 countries of China-ASEAN co-authored

papers.

country The number of paper Total citations

China 48212 1401521

Singapore 33345 1074146

USA 8196 22627

Malaysia 5514 132566

Thailand 4938 98752

Vietnam 4143 377478

Australia 3899 168784

England 3527 187431

Japan 2704 134860

Germany 2380 138799

3.5 Analysis of China-ASEAN Research

Cooperation Patter

Today, in the context of scientific and technological

globalization, multilateral cooperation is a major

trend. We define the mode of cooperation between

countries as bilateral cooperation or multilateral

cooperation. In the 2011-2020 data, we observe that

multinational co-authored papers account for only

9.99% of the total size of all co-authored papers

between China and ASEAN countries. This reflects

that China prefers the bilateral cooperation model in

the process of cooperation with ASEAN countries,

and the intensity of multinational cooperation within

the China-ASEAN community of destiny is still low.

Figure 6 shows the changes in the rate of multilateral

cooperation in China-ASEAN co-authored papers by

year from 2011 to 2020. The situation of insufficient

multilateral cooperation is improving year by year.

From Table 4, we can see that the rate of multilateral

cooperation in research between China and Singapore

is the lowest, which indicates that Singapore prefers

bilateral exchanges with China to scientific

cooperation with multiple ASEAN countries.

Meanwhile, Cambodia has the highest rate of

multilateral cooperation with China.

Figure 6: Multilateral cooperation rate of co-authored paper

(2011-2020).

Table 4: Multilateral cooperation rates of ASEAN countries

(2011-2020).

country multilateral cooperation rates

Singapore 3.50%

Vietnam 26.58%

Myanmar 27.64%

Malaysia 30.03%

Brunei 32.02%

Thailand 32.65%

Philippines 54.65%

Laos 55.42%

Indonesia 57.93%

Cambodia 64.13%

4 CONCLUSIONS

Using data from Web of Science, this paper

exhaustively analyzes the research cooperation

dynamics between China and ten ASEAN countries

from 2011 to 2020, and we have drawn the following

conclusions. Firstly, from an overall perspective, the

scientific cooperation between China and ASEAN

countries has been deepening year by year, and the

number of co-authored papers has increased

significantly, and the collaboration has become

increasingly close; secondly, the scale of the

scientific output of the ten ASEAN countries varies

greatly and shows an uneven distribution; at the same

time, almost all institutions involved in co-authoring

are universities and research institutes in each

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country, publishing papers based on project

cooperation or academic exchanges between

countries; different countries combine their

advantageous disciplines and characteristic fields to

carry out scientific research cooperation with China,

mainly in science and technology, while collaboration

in humanities and social sciences is less; the level of

international cooperation between the ten countries

varies greatly, with most countries having a low

intensity of cooperation and a high rate of multilateral

cooperation.

Based on the analysis results, the following

suggestions are made for strengthening China-

ASEAN scientific research cooperation and

achieving further joint development. First, according

to the current situation of scientific research

cooperation between China and the ten ASEAN

countries, we will strengthen scientific research

cooperation in a targeted manner. Second, China

should actively explore the new situation of science

and technology cooperation and broaden the field of

scientific research cooperation. At the same time,

actively develop cooperation channels, encourage

and guide non-governmental entities to actively

participate in science and technology cooperation.

More importantly, we will take advantage of the "Belt

and Road" policy and take advantage of the radiation

effect to promote the extensive development of

multilateral cooperative research.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This research was financially supported by Humanity

Social Sciences Fund Project of the Ministry of

Education (Grant NO. 19YJA870015) and Jiangsu

Province Social Science Fund Project (Grant NO.

17TQB009).

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