The Impact of Collaborative Research: A Case Study in a Developing Country

Abstract

Collaborative research has become a viable and strategic engagement for universities and scholars. Researchers often take part in grants and share scarce resources while gaining insight from scholars regardless of their geographical disposition. International collaboration is widely believed to be the most beneficial of collaborative research and that developing countries stand the most to benefit from such engagement. In this work, we analyze the impact of collaborative research on an institution in a developing country. The selected institution is characterized by having no Ph.D. programs and a relatively low number of master’s degrees awarded annually. Accordingly, its research output is largely dependent on its faculty members and their collaborative networks largely comprised of developed countries. We use citation counts sourced from three different indices and Clarivate’s Journal Impact Factor rankings as proxies for impact and publishing venue quality, respectively. Our findings, partially, contest the claim that international collaboration is the most impactful collaboration type. Although articles co-authored with international collaborators are on average published in insubstantially higher ranked journals, the average number of citations per paper is comparable to institutional collaboration. The latter is further ratified when self-citations are excluded. In addition, we also consider viewership as an exposure metric where institutional collaborated articles garner almost double that of international.