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International collaboration in higher education research: A gravity model approach

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Abstract

Although geographical distance has become less relevant in co–authorship for monodisciplinary fields such as economics, mathematics, and physics, little is known about international collaboration in multidisciplinary fields such as higher education. This paper studies collaboration patterns in higher education research using the Scopus database with the application of the gravity model. The results show that the intensity of collaboration is negatively associated with geographical distance and positively associated with linguistic commonality but these findings differ significantly between various world regions. European scholars appear to give preference to linguistically proximate partners over geographical neighbours. Although English is the lingua franca in science, language is not a significant factor for the formation of collaboration for North American and Asian researchers. These findings have policy implications for fostering multidisciplinary research in international partnerships.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Institutional Studies, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Stanislav Avdeev

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  1. Stanislav Avdeev
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Correspondence to Stanislav Avdeev.

Additional information

I gratefully acknowledge valuable comments and suggestions from Bernardo Pincheira, Dmitrii Shchetinin, Maria Yudkevich, colleagues at the Center for Institutional Studies, conference and workshop participants in Amsterdam, Jyväskylä, Kassel, Moscow, and Saint Petersburg, and two anonymous referees. Any errors are those of the author. The paper was prepared within the framework of the Higher School of Economics Basic Research Programme and funded by the Russian Academic Excellence Project “5–100”.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 8, 9 and 10.

Table 8 The number of joint publications between top 25 countries in 2000–2017
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Table 9 The results for all countries in 2000–2008 and 2009–2017, using the negative binomial model
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Table 10 The results for all countries in 2000–2008 and 2009–2017, using the zero–inflated count data model
Full size table

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Avdeev, S. International collaboration in higher education research: A gravity model approach. Scientometrics 126, 5569–5588 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04008-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04008-8

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