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Knowledge production and scientific research have become increasingly more collaborative and international, particularly in pharmaceuticals. We analyze international research networks on the country level in different disease groups. Our empirical analysis is based on a unique dataset of scientific publications related to pharmaceutical research. Using social network analysis, we find that both the number of countries and their connectivity increase in almost all disease groups. The cores of the networks consist of high income OECD countries and remain rather stable over time. We use network regression techniques in order to analyze the dynamics of the networks. Our results indicate that an accumulative advantage based on preferential attachment and point connectivity as a proxy for multi-connectivity are positively related to changes in the countries' collaboration intensity.

In this paper we focus on proximity as one of the main determinants of international collaboration in pharmaceutical research. We use various count data specifications of the gravity model to estimate the intensity of collaboration between pairs of countries as explained by the geographical, cognitive, institutional, social, and cultural dimensions of proximity. Our results suggest that geographical distance has a significant negative relation to the collaboration intensity between countries. The amount of previous collaborations, as a proxy for social proximity, is positively related to the number of cross-country collaborations. We do not find robust significant associations between cognitive proximity or institutional proximity with the intensity of international research collaboration. Moreover, there is no robust and significant relation between the interaction terms of geographical distance with social, cognitive, or institutional proximity, and international research collaboration. Our findings for cultural proximity do not allow of unambiguous conclusions concerning their influence on the collaboration intensity between countries. Linguistic ties among countries are associated with a higher amount of cross-country research collaboration but we find no clear association for historical and colonial linkages.