  Scientific collaborations are among the main enablers of development in small
national science systems. Although analysing scientific collaborations is a
well-established subject in scientometrics, evaluations of scientific
collaborations within a country remain speculative with studies based on a
limited number of fields or using data too inadequate to be representative of
collaborations at a national level. This study represents a unique view on the
collaborative aspect of scientific activities in New Zealand. We perform a
quantitative study based on all Scopus publications in all subjects for more
than 1500 New Zealand institutions over a period of 6 years to generate an
extensive mapping of scientific collaboration at a national level. The
comparative results reveal the level of collaboration between New Zealand
institutions and business enterprises, government institutions, higher
education providers, and private not for profit organisations in 2010-2015.
Constructing a collaboration network of institutions, we observe a power-law
distribution indicating that a small number of New Zealand institutions account
for a large proportion of national collaborations. Network centrality concepts
are deployed to identify the most central institutions of the country in terms
of collaboration. We also provide comparative results on 15 universities and
Crown research institutes based on 27 subject classifications.
