Caroline S. Wagner was a leading scholar of science and technology policy, with a research focus on global research networks, international scientific collaboration, and the use of scientometric indicators to understand and inform policy. She earned a doctorate in science and technology dynamics from the Amsterdam School of Communications Research, University of Amsterdam (studying under Loet Leydesdorff), an M.A. in Science, Technology and Public Policy from George Washington University, and a B.A. from Trinity College.

Before joining Ohio State in 2011, Wagner spent more than thirty years as a policy analyst across government and research institutions on three continents. She served on the staff of the U.S. Congress Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, worked at the Office of Technology Assessment and the U.S. Department of State, and was deputy to the director of RAND’s Science & Technology Policy Institute, which served the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She advised the World Bank, the OECD, and the United Nations Millennium Development Project. From 2011 to 2021 she held the Ambassador Milton A. and Roslyn Z. Wolf Chair in International Affairs at Ohio State’s John Glenn College. She was a Distinguished Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a former elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Science policy and the globalization of research

A central theme in Wagner’s work is the transition from twentieth-century ‘big science’, organized around national institutions, state funding, and prestige projects, to a twenty-first-century model of globally distributed, self-organizing research networks. Her 2008 book The New Invisible College: Science for Development argues that this networked model gives developing countries new opportunities to access and contribute to the global knowledge pool, rather than having to replicate expensive national science establishments. The book draws on complex-adaptive-systems and network theory (including concepts such as preferential attachment and scale-free networks) and combines quantitative indicators with extensive interviews.

She extended this argument in The Collaborative Era in Science: Governing the Network, which examines how abundance of data, information, and computing power, rather than scarcity, now shapes research, and how openness, problem-focused collaboration, and reciprocity have become defining features of contemporary science. The book addresses policy implications for funding agencies, intellectual property, open access, and global science governance.

Wagner’s more recent policy work examines great-power competition and science. She has argued that Western restrictions on scientific engagement with China, motivated by economic-competitiveness concerns, are unlikely to achieve their stated goals and risk damaging the practice of science itself. Her research on China also challenges assumptions in research-policy literature that link scientific strength to democratic institutions, suggesting that in China’s case scientific capacity has depended more on state capacity-building than on political liberalization. She served on the Council of Canadian Academies’ Expert Panel on International Science, Technology and Knowledge Partnerships (2024 report, Navigating Collaborative Futures).

International scientific collaboration

Much of Wagner’s empirical research, often conducted with longtime collaborator Loet Leydesdorff and others such as Lutz Bornmann and Travis Whetsell, uses co-authorship and citation data to map how international collaboration has evolved. Key contributions include:

• Core-periphery structure: with Leydesdorff, Wagner showed that international collaboration tends to form around a stable ‘core group’ of highly connected, scientifically advanced nations, with other countries linking in at varying degrees of centrality—work published in the Journal of Informetrics.
• Funding, government investment, and citation impact: research with Bornmann and Leydesdorff examined how government funding and international collaboration jointly relate to citation impact, and how funding and research output relate at the macro (national) level.
• National standing in the world science system: with Leydesdorff, Wagner produced widely cited analyses asking whether the United States was ‘losing ground’ in science relative to a globalizing system, tracking shifts in relative national output and centrality.
• U.S.–China scientific cooperation: research tracing the growth and changing character of U.S.–China research ties, including the effects of Chinese government programs to recruit overseas-trained researchers back to China.
• Pandemic-era collaboration: studies of COVID-19 research output found publication volumes tracking national outbreak timing, very limited participation by lower-income countries, and topic maps showing emergent clusters in patient care and public health, read by Wagner as evidence that global science functions as a self-organizing, reputation-driven system even under crisis conditions.
• Gender and collaboration: contributing bibliographic and empirical work supporting analyses (including a PLoS Biology primer) of how gender relates to patterns of scientific collaboration.

Scientometrics and indicators

Wagner was an active contributor to the scientometrics and informetrics community, not only a user of its methods. She served as a conference organizer for the 2023 conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) and co-edited the associated special issue of Scientometrics featuring the conference’s top papers. She was member of the editorial boards of a number of journals and served for 10 years as the editor of the journal Science and Public Policy.

She co-edited a special issue of Scientometrics in honour of Loet Leydesdorff, her longtime collaborator and doctoral supervisor at the University of Amsterdam, with whom she co-authored many of the network and citation studies described above. The issue brought together contributions reflecting on Leydesdorff’s influence on scientometrics, information theory, and the study of innovation systems.

On methodology, Wagner’s scientometric work engages with debates over the proper normalization of citation counts (including contributions to the Integrated Impact Indicator, or I3 literature), network measures such as betweenness centrality and diversity as proxies for interdisciplinarity, and the use of co-authorship networks, topic/cluster maps, and macro-level national indicators to inform the science of science policy. A recurring argument across this body of work is that quantitative indicators are most useful for policy when interpreted alongside qualitative understanding of how scientists actually form and sustain collaborative ties, an emphasis that runs from her earliest network studies through to her most recent work on geopolitics and science.

We will sorely miss her energy, her generosity and warmth, and her sharp intellect.

Header picture by Tasha k on Unsplash.
DOI: 10.59350/rhg65-62v63 (export/download/cite this blog post)