Analyzing international scientific collaboration pattern for China by using ESI database

The importance of international scientific collaboration has increased, and this is most marked for China as a rising economy. This paper looks into Chinese international scientific collaboration from co-authorship at the international level by using data of ESI highly cited papers. Special attention is given to collaboration with the established economies. It first introduces the definition of association rules, and then provides the dataset for further analysis. We find that USA is the top one collaborator in China´s highly cited papers; Germany, England, France are China´s top three EU partners; Japan and Australia are top two Asian collaborators. The analyses also suggest that Chinese internationally co-authored papers have a higher citation than its domestic papers. The most collaborated fields with its main partner countries are also explored.