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The relationship between scientists’ research performance and the degree of internationalization of their research

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Abstract

Policy makers, at various levels of governance, generally encourage the development of research collaboration. However the underlying determinants of collaboration are not completely clear. In particular, the literature lacks studies that, taking the individual researcher as the unit of analysis, attempt to understand if and to what extent the researcher’s scientific performance might impact on his/her degree of collaboration with foreign colleagues. The current work examines the international collaborations of Italian university researchers for the period 2001–2005, and puts them in relation to each individual’s research performance. The results of the investigation, which assumes co-authorship as proxy of research collaboration, show that both research productivity and average quality of output have positive effects on the degree of international collaboration achieved by a scientist.

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Notes

  1. Research collaboration appears to be the rule and not the exception (Katz 2000).

  2. It is widely assumed that collaboration in research is ‘a good thing’ and that it should be encouraged (Katz and Martin 1997).

  3. On one hand, research collaborations are generally undertaken and encouraged because they are viewed as advantageous. On the other hand, and in the direction of causality which this work intends to analyze, the researchers involved in international collaborations could be those with a higher level of performance, who, in virtue of their greater notoriety, experience greater facility in initiating collaborations with foreign colleagues.

  4. For the 147,000 Italian academic publications indexed in the ORP between 2001 and 2005, the statistic harmonic average of precision and recall (F-measure) of authorships as disambiguated by our algorithm is around 95% (sampling error of 2%, confidence level of 98%). When one observes large populations of scientists, the number of homonyms is very high (in the Italian academic system 12% of the 60,000 scientists are affected by homonymy) and their disambiguation within acceptable margins of error is a truly formidable task. According to Zitt and Bassecoulard (2004): “Unification of authors' family names, of institutions such as labs, of lexical forms—in order to avoid synonymy or homonymy lato sensu—can be a bibliometrician's nightmare”. This is why bibliometrics-based studies are generally carried out at aggregated levels of analysis, such as university levels. When they are conducted at single scientist level or research group, they are limited to one or few organizations or scientific disciplines. In that case it is possible to disambiguate manually. Considering the vast field of observation, the error levels in the dataset used in this study appear more than acceptable.

  5. Mathematics and computer sciences; physics; chemistry; earth sciences; biology; medicine; agricultural and veterinary sciences; civil engineering and architecture; industrial and information engineering.

  6. http://cercauniversita.cineca.it/php5/docenti/cerca.php.

  7. Note that the total of column 2 (62,676) is greater than the overall number of publications realized in international co-authorship (41,445), since a publication can be co-authored with more than one foreign nation.

  8. Analogous to the preceding analysis of foreign nations involved, here each publication is counted under each UDA with at least one co-author member. For example, a publication realized by a one researcher in Physics and three in Chemistry is counted (once) for both of these UDAs.

  9. Of the models analyzed, this one presents the lowest value of Akaike IC and highest value of log-likelihood.

  10. These models suit count data.

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Acknowledgment

Authors are grateful to Tindaro Cicero for his major support in statistical analysis.

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Correspondence to Giovanni Abramo.

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Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C.A. & Solazzi, M. The relationship between scientists’ research performance and the degree of internationalization of their research. Scientometrics 86, 629–643 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-010-0284-7

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