Global interdisciplinary research network
"Collaboration in Science and in Technology"

The rise in collaboration in science and in technology experienced world-wide at national and international level, has assumed such an overriding importance that there is now an urgent need perceptible to study such processes with a view to acquiring fundamental knowledge for organizing future research and its application to science and technology policies. The last few years have seen an ascendancy in how to treat these international issues. However, this trend has still failed to provide a concept on a fundamental and interrelated theory regarding the theme entitled “Collaboration in science and in technology“. The different approaches taken so far have revealed the shortcomings of integration.

By all accounts, this field of research is required to be a comprehensive and diversified area ranging from small-group research in social psychology/sociology to large network analyses conducted into international co-authorship or citation networks, including the concomitant observation of informal communication via interviews or interrogative surveys on bibliometrical analyses. On account of the diversity of these issues it is possible to obtain promising results only against the backdrop of an interdisciplinary approach and from an intercultural viewpoint.

The growing importance of collaboration in research and the still underdeveloped state-of-the-art of research on collaboration have encouraged us to establish a global interdisciplinary research network under the title

"Collaboration in Science and in Technology"

(COLLNET) with Berlin as its virtual center which has been set up on January 1st, 2000, under the authorship of Hildrun Kretschmer in her capacity as co-ordinator.

The network is to comprise the prominent scientists, who work at present mostly in the field of quantitative science studies, coming from 15 countries of America, Asia, Australia and Europe. Our intention is to work together in co-operation both on theoretical and applied aspects.

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