Influence of cultural proximity on the intensity of scientific cooperation among countries along the Belt and Road

Transnational scientific cooperation is one of the most important contents in the Belt and Road Initiative, and mutual trust is the vital foundation of the cooperation. As the countries along the Belt and Road are quite different in the economic scale and social and cultural environment, cultural proximity is of great value to enhance mutual trust among countries and to promote transnational scientific cooperation. Considering the possibility of magnifying the effect of the economy scale, population size, and the total number of papers mainly represented by the number of co-authors on the research cooperation level, this study characterizes the level of scientific cooperation by the cooperation intensity of scientific papers through the improved Salton index and the number of co-authored papers among 66 countries along the Belt and Road between 2007-2020. The evolution process of scientific cooperation intensity in 2007-2013 and 2014-2020 is analyzed by using social network analysis, regression analysis and GIS spatial analysis, so as to explore the possible impact of cultural proximity. The results are as follows: (1) Comprehensive analysis of the scale and intensity of paper cooperation helps identify the real cooperative relationship among the countries based on the proximity of languages, religions, and other cultural elements. The religious proximity helps to enhance mutual trust, and the linguistic proximity helps to enhance mutual understanding. (2) Since 2007, the scientific cooperation network has changed from“two cores and nine centers”to “one core and eight centers”. China has become the only core of the network, and the centrality gap of weighting degree is widening. (3) The total number of published papers, the gap of the economic development, political relations, geographical distances, linguistic proximity and religious proximity all have a significant impact on the intensity of scientific cooperation. Among them, the impact of cultural proximity (language and religion) is the most significant, but it tends to weaken. The impact of linguistic proximity is stronger than the religious proximity, but only the same languages or languages belonging to the same branch can significantly promote scientific cooperation among countries. It hinders the construction of scientific cooperation network that China has no natural cultural proximity with most of the countries along the Belt and Road. Therefore, it is necessary to pay more attention to cross-cultural exchanges and communication in the future, so as to enhance the trust in the field of scientific cooperation and promote the effectiveness of scientific cooperation.