Foreign Born Scientists and Non-Academic Collaboration in the United States

Abstract

Academics are no longer the isolated scientists and engineers. Collaboration is the norm of science, and the co-production of academic research with non-academics is recognized as critical to producing research that can lead to broader impacts. Less understood, however, is how the expanding foreign-born academic workforce in the United States contributes to this co-production. Given the high proportion of foreign-born faculty in the U.S., research on this highly productive subset of faculty researchers is relatively limited. We examine the preferences of foreign-born faculty in the U.S. to collaborate with a range of non-academic institutions, in the U.S. and abroad. We use the lens of institutional logics to differentiate between science and other logics, including those of a community/societal impact nature. We use data from a robust national survey and related lifetime bibliometric data to analyze these collaborative patterns. A notable aspect of our work is that we categorize collaborative ties by research and non-research, as well as by sector. We find that foreign-born faculty more engaged than domestically-born faculty in collaborations with care, state and commercial logics. We also find distinct differences based on the geographic region of origin of foreign-born scientists, evidencing the need to abandon a dichotomous treatment of foreignness. The implications for the results of this study are relevant to the growing body of work on foreign-born faculty and the contributions of mobile researchers.