International collaboration in higher education research: A gravity model approach

Abstract

Geographical distance has become less relevant in co-authorship for monodisciplinary research fields such as economics, mathematics, physics. Multidisciplinary fields are influenced by the norms and traditions of other fields. Higher education is a multidisciplinary field of research in which multiple communities operate under different norms and paradigms. We study collaboration patterns in higher education research across different world regions using the Scopus database with the application of the gravity model. Our results show that international collaboration has intensified and increased rapidly in the last two decades. We confirm that the intensity of collaboration is dependent on geographical distance and linguistic commonality. The importance of geographical proximity differs significantly between various world regions. EU scholars appear to give preference to linguistic proximate partners over geographical neighbors. Despite the fact that English is the lingua franca in science, language is not a significant factor for the formation of collaboration for North American researchers. This study contributes to the current discussion on the importance of international collaboration in science, paying special attention to the growing public interest in multidisciplinary research.

An evolving international research collaboration network: spatial and thematic developments in co-authored higher education research, 1998–2018

“…Our joint bibliometric and network analyses show dynamic patterns of collaboration among countries, yet the expansion is mediated by the narrow structure of international co-authorships. While (many) more countries have joined the network, especially over the latter decade analyzed , they tend to gravitate around a small group of central, largely Anglophone, countries-where the leading researchers are based-and this reflects the field's persistent stratification (see also Vlegels & Huisman, 2020;Akbaritabar & Barbato, 2021;Avdeev, 2021). Such results should be read carefully since our sample of journals and articles is based on English language journals.…”

“…1 shows the research articles published in the selected 13 prominent journals in the field (methodological details described below) indicating that, in the two decades since 1998, higher education research has grown exponentially (confirming Vlegels & Huisman, 2020). And similar to scientific research generally, accompanying this expansion is a steady increase in higher education researchers working together across country boundaries (Akbaritabar & Barbato, 2021;Avdeev, 2021).…”

“…Growth in co-authored scientific publications worldwide across the sciences has been exponential, yet more slowly in the social sciences (Mosbah-Natanson & Gingras, 2013;Powell et al, 2017). If co-authorships across national and cultural boundaries are also increasingly prominent in higher education (HE), this multidisciplinary field, increasingly theoretically and methodologically sophisticated, has only become collaborative over the past two decades-with important, persistent regional and country differences (e.g., Akbaritabar & Barbato, 2021;Avdeev, 2021;Kwiek, 2020a;Marginson, 2021). Global networks increasingly connect higher education's many organizational forms and researchers, especially those working internationally and comparatively (Kosmützky & Krücken, 2014).…”

“…Akbaritabar and Barbato's (2021) network analysis, based on Scopus data, confirms the divide between Europe's internationalized higher education journals and the less open North American journals. Avdeev (2021), analyzing geographic and linguistic proximity also using Scopus data, shows major English-speaking countries, Western Europe, and China as key areas for higher education research.…”

Los estudios sobre formación en psicología en la Revista Puertorriqueña de Psicología: Análisis de indicadores de internacionalización

“…Resulta interesante observar que hasta el 1993, los trabajos habían sido todos de una sola autoría, mientras que, a partir de allí, han ido en aumento los índices de co-autoría. Ello se corresponde a lo observado en la literatura internacional, la cual muestra un aumento significativo de las co-autorías en las últimas dos décadas (Avdeev, 2021).…”