Beyond borders: Achieving research performance breakthrough with academic collaborations

Abstract

Collaborative research papers are widely acknowledged to be more impactful than single‐authored studies in higher education amidst subject area known to alter citation counts. While preceding studies have mostly recognised these two as the antecedents of research impact separately, it needs to be clarified whether the interaction of research area and type of collaboration causes any moderation. Comprehensive knowledge of differences in impact caused by a certain combination of type and area is important because, if citation impact is associated only with a particular combination, the impact‐based research stimulation programs without regard to combination consequences may be cost‐ineffective if not self‐destructing. This study investigates how research collaborations in academia impact the productivity and impact of university faculty. The focus is on the impact variation due to the type of academic collaboration (internal, domestic, international) and the research area. For the empirical test of this study, publicly open data from 1368 faculty in one of the leading Russian higher education institutions—HSE University. Results have two‐fold nature. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) researchers are more likely to collaborate with domestic co‐authors. This result accentuates the specifics of the academic traditions in the research areas highly recognised for having a long and successful history and worldwide impact on science. The collaborations built on international coauthorship are associated with higher publication visibility rates for researchers from emerging fields in Russia, like those in social sciences and humanities, whereas institutional collaborations are found to be positively related to the share of cited documents. This article sheds light on the differences in academic collaboration mechanisms influencing research productivity and impact in two distinct research areas. It invites revisiting policies stimulating collaborative activities in universities, demonstrating their potentially discrepant consequences. The study's substantial contribution also refers to the use of panel data on personal attributes, research productivity and impact, which is a rare case for research collaboration studies.