#scientific-collaboration

#scientific-collaboration

The only woman in a laboratory filled with men, Katharine Burr Blodgett soon becomes indispensable as an assistant to the General Electric Company's most famous scientist, Irving Langmuir. Their working relationship is an elegant symbiosis. Her forte is experimentation; his is scientific theory. We follow their partnership as they successfully find ways to build a better lightbulb, but Langmuir stumbles with an off-the-wall theory of matter.

Perhaps the most commonly told myth in all of science is that of the lone genius. The blueprint for it goes something like this. Once upon a time in history, someone with a towering intellect but no formal training wades into a field that's new to them for the first time. Upon considering the field's issues, they immediately see things that no one else has ever seen before.

The Trump administration is directing employees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to investigate foreign scientists who collaborate with the agency on research papers for evidence of "subversive or criminal activity." The new directive, part of a broader effort to increase scrutiny of research done with foreign partners, asks workers in the agency's research arm to use Google to check the backgrounds of all foreign nationals collaborating with its scientists.

To be a genius requires extraordinary intellect and talent, but also hard work and persistence. And although the mythology of genius can be problematic because it reduces the collective work that goes into developing scientific breakthroughs to extraordinary individual accomplishments, portrayals of genius in film and literature succeed in dazzling popular audiences.

Data indicate that geopolitical tensions are affecting how scientists around the world collaborate on research projects. But "rather than uniformly shrinking, global academic networks are being reconfigured", says Marina Zhang, a technology and geopolitics researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, in Australia. Collaborations with Israel and Russia, and between China and the United States, are among those seeing such shifts.

The Nature Index is a database of author affiliations and institutional relationships. The index tracks contributions to research articles published in high-quality natural-science and health-science journals, chosen based on reputation by an independent group of researchers. The Nature Index provides absolute and fractional counts of article publication at the institutional and national level and, as such, is an indicator of global high-quality research output and collaboration.

Pressing challenges, from the climate emergency to pandemic preparedness, demand concerted efforts at the global scale. But the growth in the use of international sanctions since the Second World War, although mostly targeted at economic growth and military capacity, has also affected science and scientific cooperation (see 'Science, restricted' and Supplementary information for raw data). Many nations have suspended publicly funded collaborations with the scientific institutions of several countries, including Iran, North Korea and Russia.

At the start of this year, Nature began a co-reviewing project designed to encourage established academics to mentor early-career researchers (ECRs) in carrying out peer review.