Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the scientific collaboration of institutions and its impact on institutional research performance in terms of productivity and quality. The researchers examined the local and international collaborations that have a great impact on institutional performance. Design/methodology/approach Collaboration dependence measure was used to investigate the impact of an institution on external information. Based on this information, the authors used “index of gain in impact through collaboration” to find the impact of collaborated publications in institutional research performance. Bibliographic data between 1996 and 2010 retrieved from Scopus were used to conduct current study. The authors carried out the case study of top institutes of Pakistan in terms of publication count to elaborate the difference between high performing institutions and those who gain disproportionally in terms of perceived quality of their output because of local or international collaboration. Findings The results showed that the collaboration of developing countries institutes on international level had a great impact on institutional performance and they gain more benefit than local collaboration. Altogether, the scientific collaboration has a positive impact on institutional performance as measured by the cumulative source normalized impact per paper of their publications. The findings could also help researchers to find out appropriate collaboration partners. Originality/value This study has revealed some salient characteristics of collaboration in academic research. It becomes apparent that collaboration intensity is not uniform, but in general, the average quality of scientific production is the variable that most often correlates positively with the collaboration intensity of universities.

This chapter presents a novel scientific research landscape of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in order to access the research productivity, scholarly impact, and international collaborations across all GCC countries over the time period of 2008–2018, using the Scopus database. While we observe a significant increase in investing the resources in GCC world in order to build research infrastructure to make shift from only oil producing countries to knowledge-based economies, not enough efforts have been done to measure the outcomes of these investments. The chapter explores different thematic areas that have evolved over a decade related to TDI, top scientists, and top institutions in GCC. Further, the study investigates international collaboration networks within or outside GCC to better understand the venues of knowledge exchange with GCC countries. It is expected that the findings of this case study would provide an insight to the research landscape of the GCC and useful information to the scientific community as well as to the technology and innovation policymakers.