Sixty years ago, Francis Crick and James Watson announced their discovery of the structure of DNA. The academics themselves were an international pair: one was American, the other British. Back then, both needed to be in Cambridge to work together. Things had changed little in the 250 years since Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz argued about calculus. Today, however, duos such as Crick and Watson can work in different countries because technology has slashed the cost of collaborating among research leaders.
The UK, and Cambridge university, provide evidence of this change. Since 1981, the number of journal articles produced by UK researchers has risen 150 per cent, to about 100,000 articles a year. But when you look at domestic papers, where all of the authors were in Britain, output is almost flat. According to the Thomson Reuters Web of Science database of 12,000 journals, since 2010 the majority of journal articles with a British-based author has had at least one co-author from another country.
This is not a solely UK phenomenon. Research shows the same trend in the US, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Academics may reside in one country, but they belong to a community that has no boundaries. Their output is international. This has particularly affected cutting-edge research teams. We can measure the importance of research by counting how many times articles are subsequently cited by other researchers. The average citation impact of UK research is well above the world average. However, an article produced by a mixture of UK-based and foreign researchers can expect to be cited more than half as many times again compared with a wholly UK research team.