Abstract
The global network of scientific collaboration created by researchers opens new opportunities for developing countries to engage in the process of knowledge creation historically lead by institutions in the developed world. The results discussed here explore how Cubans working in European science and technology might contribute to extending the scientific collaboration of the country through their ties with Cuban institutions mainly in the academic sector. A bibliometric method was used to explore the pattern of collaboration of Cuban researchers in Europe using the institutional affiliation of authors and collaborators. The records of scientific publications of the defined sample were obtained from Scopus database for the period between 1995 and 2014. The network of collaboration was generated using the affiliations of Cuban authors in Europe and co-authors with worldwide affiliations shown in the records of publications of each Cuban researcher of the study. The analysis of aggregate values of the output of Cuban researchers in Europe (1995–2014) reveals that their collaboration with Cuba correlates moderately with their performance in Europe. However, when taking into account their time publishing in Europe, the collaboration with Cuba decreases the longer they remain away from home. The network of collaborating Cuban researchers in Europe comprises 991 different affiliations from 58 countries: 698 from Europe, 118 from North America, 96 from Latin America and 79 from the rest of the world. K-core analysis of centrality shows two Cuban universities sharing the central position with another 24 institutions worldwide of which 18 belong to higher education.
Highlights
The global network of scientific collaboration created by researchers opens new opportunities to developing countries to engage in the process of knowledge creation, historically lead by institutions in the developed world
The approach used to create the list of Cuban researchers in Europe yielded 90% of Cubans showing an identification number (ID) in Scopus (135/150), of which 78.5% were active researchers
The use of professional networks, such as LinkedIn and ResearchGate to find the individuals of the sample, and second the process used for disambiguation of names/surnames of each individual
Summary
The global network of scientific collaboration created by researchers opens new opportunities to developing countries to engage in the process of knowledge creation, historically lead by institutions in the developed world. Internationalization of higher education (HE) has allowed developing countries to engage in the global network of scientific collaboration by sending doctoral students to further their education in universities of the developed world, as well as exchanging students within the developing countries. The beneficial outcome generated by the mobility of researchers within the context of global networks of scientific collaboration turns detrimental when mobility ends in permanent migration. Their return to the country of origin still remains poor in the developing world. Two main factors affect this problem: structural, economic and financial difficulties existing in many developing countries and the opportunities offered by developed countries to retain the best and brightest researchers for the benefit of their economies (Kuptsch 2006; Docquier and Machado 2016)
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