Transnational Research Collaboration: Expatriate Indian Faculty in the United States Connecting with Peers in India

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In the last two decades, research collaborations inside the United States and with other countries have increased. Scholars who have studied the composition in scientific collaborations have noted demographic factors as important personal attributes. However, little scholarly work has examined how national origin affects international research collaboration in the United States. This article presents some findings from a National Science Foundation–funded study on the international research collaboration activities of fifty-one Indian immigrant faculty members from eighteen American universities. Collaboration identified in this study goes beyond coauthorship, which remains a popular measure of research collaboration in the literature. The results suggest that while international collaboration is growing, migrants do not necessarily collaborate only with those from their home country, as suggested in transnationalism literature. In fact, more than one-third of the respondents in this study collaborate only within the United States. Those who do collaborate with Indian researchers are more likely to build alliances with scholars who have been trained in the United States and have returned to India, giving credence to social network theory. Despite advances in technology, face-to-face interaction was the most preferred form of collaboration.