Relations between international research collaboration, scientific production and the impact of research at Polish universities

International collaboration is one of the effective ways to enhance the impact of scientific research papers. In this research, international research collaboration papers published by world-class universities in the field of humanities and social sciences from 2015 to 2019 were selected as the research object, and the effective enhancement of the impact of international research collaboration papers was found to not be dependent on expanding the scale of international research collaboration, but rather on selecting researchers with different international backgrounds and from high-level institutions for collaboration. It was also discovered that, in the field of humanities and social sciences, despite a relatively low proportion of international research collaboration papers being led by Chinese scholars, the Chinese research is characterized by a higher impact compared with the research led by non-Chinese scholars. In light of this, a series of proactive measures should be taken by China’s world-class universities, such as actively participating in and initiating international collaboration, selecting high-level research collaborators, and attracting scholars from different countries to engage in research collaboration in the field of humanities and social sciences.

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Is academia becoming more localised? The growth of regional knowledge networks within international research collaboration

Applied Network Science ◽

10.1007/s41109-021-00371-w ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

Author(s):

John Fitzgerald ◽

Sanna Ojanperä ◽

Neave O’Clery

Keyword(s):

Economic Development ◽

International Collaboration ◽

International Research ◽

Research Collaboration ◽

Learning By Doing ◽

Knowledge Networks ◽

Collaboration Network ◽

International Research Collaboration ◽

The Past ◽

Capability Building

AbstractIt is well-established that the process of learning and capability building is core to economic development and structural transformation. Since knowledge is ‘sticky’, a key component of this process is learning-by-doing, which can be achieved via a variety of mechanisms including international research collaboration. Uncovering significant inter-country research ties using Scopus co-authorship data, we show that within-region collaboration has increased over the past five decades relative to international collaboration. Further supporting this insight, we find that while communities present in the global collaboration network before 2000 were often based on historical geopolitical or colonial lines, in more recent years they increasingly align with a simple partition of countries by regions. These findings are unexpected in light of a presumed continual increase in globalisation, and have significant implications for the design of programmes aimed at promoting international research collaboration and knowledge diffusion.

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