The correlation between the level of internationalization of a country’s scientific production and that of relevant citing publications

The growing complexity of scientific challenges demands increasingly intense research collaboration, both domestic and international. The resulting trend affects not only the modes of producing new knowledge, but also the way it is disseminated within scientific communities. This paper analyses the relationship between the “level of internationalization” of a country’s scientific production and that of the relevant citing publications. The field of observation consists of Italian publications over the period 2010-2012 and the relative citations accumulated as of 31/05/2017. Findings show: i) the probability of being cited increases with the level of internationalization of the research team; ii) totally domestic research teams tend to cite domestic publications to a greater extent; iii) vice versa, publications resulting from international collaborations involving a minority Italian co-authors tend to be more cited by publications with a totally foreign byline. These results emerge both overall and at the level of individual disciplines.