Researchers at Science Europe and the giant Amsterdam-based publishing company Elsevier prepared the 50-page report, Comparative Benchmarking of European and US Research Collaboration and Researcher Mobility.

This comparison is made by exploring both the extent to which academics collaborate on research papers and the amount of researcher mobility within Europe or within the US and beyond, based on author affiliations.

In particular, they are interested in whether there is as

much collaboration between countries in Europe as there

is between states in the US. 

International collaboration rates globally have risen in recent years this trend is reflected also in the tendency for European and uS authors to form collaborations that result in co-authored research outputs with researchers outside their own region. While a high and rising proportion of European research outputs represent collaborations with researchers outside Europe, with a similar trend apparent in the US, it is the case that the US is involved in a higher proportion of such collaboration than Europe.

It shows that both Europe and the US have experienced steady growth in overall collaboration rates since 2003. Inter-country collaboration in Europe showed an increase, from slightly more than 11% in 2003 to 13% of articles in 2011, contrasting with recently decreasing levels in analogous inter-state collaboration in the US, at 16% of articles in 2011.