Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In the emerging knowledge economy, scientific pursuit in the form of international collaboration has been escalating. Studies consistently report that collaboration cross national borders is not only common among advanced economies but also emerging scientific nations. This has aroused interest from social scientists and captured the attention of policymakers. International collaboration between Germany and China is particularly interesting. Germany is the leading scientific nation in EU in all aspects. China, as a rising scientific power, is changing the global landscape of ideas and innovation along with other emerging countries.

In spite of the growing significance of the Germany-China relationship, surprisingly, few empirical studies have examined research collaboration between the leading EU country and an emerging scientific power. This study seeks to address some of research gap by profiling the Germany-China collaboration and its impact based upon highly cited papers.

Combining both bibliometric and regression analysis, this study uses a special group of highly cited papers as an instrument to examine the features and impacts of Sino-German research collaboration. This study found the exponential growth of bilateral collaboration is funding driven with asymmetric distribution in many aspects. It also finds evidence in support of the positive impact of Sino-German collaboration on the research visibility of China’s most influential research. It also reveals that the premium of bilateral collaboration on research impact is larger for China than Germany. Policy implications are proposed in the end.