Higher Education Systems and Institutions, Poland

Internationalists and locals: international research collaboration in a resource-poor system

“…The international opportunities were restricted by wider politics and a lack of research funding in the 1980s and by a lack of research funding and new, readily available teachingfocused revenue generation by scientists and their institutions in the 1990s and 2000s. Then the opportunities were widely open in the 2010s, with revised research policies powerfully supporting internationalization in research (Kwiek and Szadkowski 2018;Antonowicz et al 2017) for all academic cohorts. In other words, in Poland as elsewhere, "success in science depends, in part, on things outside of the control of the individual scientist" (Stephan and Levin 1992: 4).…”

“…Average individual productivity, research orientation, and involvement in international research collaboration diminished. Prevailing academic norms also differ between those entering the profession before and after the reforms of the 2010s (Kwiek and Szadkowski 2018).…”

“…Until about 2009, Polish universities remained largely unreformed following fundamental changes in 1989. Core features of the system-relatively non-competitive funding modes, strongly collegial governance, and a complicated multi-level system of academic degrees and careers-remained largely untouched until the early 2010s (for more detail, see Kwiek and Szadkowski 2018). Since the 2000s, research output has been assessed, benchmarked, and linked to public funding levels-at the aggregate level in the case of basic academic units and at the individual level for project-based research funding.…”

“…Instead, international research collaboration as a behavioral concept was measured as a crude Yes or No, and different individual perceptions of internationalization in research were amalgamated and averaged. A second limitation is that Polish scientists could not be compared across institutions-for example, the study does not illuminate differences between scientists from prestigious institutions (especially the flagship institutions, the University of Warsaw and Jagiellonian University; see Kwiek and Szadkowski 2018) and those of lower academic standing. A further limitation relates to the structure of the dataset; as no distinction could be drawn between single-author and multiple-author publications only total counts were possible.…”

Academic Collaboration via Resource Contributions: An Egocentric Dataset

“…At the same time, the funding and material resources are only average (cf. Czerniawska, 2018; Kwiek and Szadkowski, 2018). These conditions, next to some others, keep Polish science largely outside of the strict core of international scientific collaboration (Leydesdorff et al, 2013).…”