Abstract
Analyzing the number of publications and proportion of corresponding authors of Latin American scholars and scholars from the German Max Planck Society (MPS) and the Leibniz Association (LA; 1954–2018), this article asks if North–South partnerships continue to represent power imbalances. Our bibliometric analysis indicates that (a) in comparison with the LA, the MPS’s scientists published more articles with Latin American countries, led by Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico; (b) researchers from the MPS and the LA frequently took the role of corresponding author; (c) researchers from Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico primarily controlled their region’s productivity, but (d) Brazil built its own multinational research networks; and (e) countries with less productivity, such as Colombia and Uruguay, are on peripheries of research networks. Our findings indicate that the decolonial perspective needs further development to identify multipolar relationships of dominance and collaboration have developed out of a dichotomy world of North–South relations.
Highlights
It is true that scientists based in countries such as India, Spain, China, and Australia participate as corresponding authors in our dataset of collaboration (5% and 9%, 8% and 13%, 2% and 6%, and 6% and 7%) but with percentages lower than 10%, similar to the second group of Latin American countries with greater imbalances in research collaboration
The Max Planck Society (MPS)’s scientists published many more articles with Latin American authors than did those working at the Leibniz Association (LA)
This fact signals significant differences in the degree of research collaboration among the 84 institutes that are affiliated with the MPS
Summary
To what extent does current scientific collaboration act as a form of neocolonial control that is exerted through knowledge production? Most studies on research partnerships (Baud, 2002; Mazzoleni & Nelson, 2007) and contemporary bibliometric analysis of research partnerships (Aldieri et al, 2018; Belter et al, 2019; Eduan & Yuanqun, 2018; Owusu-Nimo & Boshoff, 2017; Payumo et al, 2019; Pohl & Lane, 2018) seem to take for granted the positive outcomes of research collaboration for all parties through identifying social and educational conditions that enable scientific networks. We question whether the interaction of the MPS and the LA can rightfully continue to be framed, as the decolonial authors we cite have traditionally argued, as an imbalance Instead, if they merely promote and continue to reproduce cultural alienation from a scientific system that shuts them out and is controlled by researchers in Western European countries and the United States. A decolonial perspective would aim to create an intellectual endeavor for understanding the “colonial matrix of power” (Mignolo, 2011b) that conceptualizes the invisible conditions that determine imbalances between previous countries and people If these patterns hold true nowadays, they should be encountered in the dominance of outputs from researchers from some countries and in their control of research agendas. These updated alternative reflections critical to the decolonial perspective suggest that the main decolonial hypothesis on the persistence of imbalances deserves being further tested through more sophisticated methods that allow gaining insights about contemporary research collaboration
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