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.

This article aims to reveal the factors that affecting the impact of international collaboration papers in the field of social sciences and humanities. Based on resource-based theory and transaction cost theory, we analyzed the articles from a sample of 13,331 listed research papers come from the 42 world class universities in China using descriptive statistics, ordinary least square (OLS) regression, and came to the following conclusions: First, it is the quality rather than the quantity of international collaborator that affect the academic influence of the research outputs. Second, researchers from different backgrounds are conducive to improve the impact of research papers and the collaboration leading by Chinese university perform better. Yet, too much collaborators coming from different institutions would have an adverse impact, which may due to the increase cost of cooperation. Finally, collaborating researchers from developed countries or top universities will significantly improve the research performance because of the abundant resources behind them. Findings from this research suggest that setting up international collaboration should pay more attention to the level of the collaborator and consider the cost behind the whole process.

Under the background of insufficient scientific research funding, evaluating the level of scientific research from the perspective of sustainable development is necessary. The study aims to develop an evaluation index system based on the theories for sustainable competitive advantage (SCA), which could be used to evaluate the sustainable development trend of scientific research in universities. In this study, 42 world-class universities in China are used as examples to calculate their SCA performance in scientific research using the entropy and equal weights methods. The scores of scientific research in different universities in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) in 2021 are used to verify the effectiveness of the evaluation index system. The results show that the evaluation index system can effectively predict the scientific research performance of universities in the future. It could be deduced from the results that universities with better scientific research performance meet the needs of the external market better and have more valuable, rare, imitable, and ambiguous resources but a lower level of scientific research dynamic ability. The evaluation index system makes up for the lack of emphasis on the potential scientific research capacity of the university in the current evaluation methods. It can help university administrators formulate relevant scientific research management regulations.