International Research Collaboration Measurement

How international research collaboration (IRC) activities of a country are evaluated can have a marked influence on policy and research funding decisions. This thesis explores this topic in three stages: first, the relevant literature on international research collaboration measurement (IRCM) is reviewed; following the review, the roles of three elements relevant to IRCM are explored, namely, data sources, measures, and indicators; finally, the findings are used to propose recommendations for using these elements when evaluating IRC. This thesis is beneficial in the contemporary academic landscape. Most academics are aware of the inequities that are systemically ingrained by the numerous metrics that are used to measure academic impact and excellence. These metrics may reflect inherent biases as they can be manipulated by individuals or countries seeking to improve their evaluation outcomes by capitalising on specific opportunities. Therefore, these metrics foster harmful competition and artificial elitism, and disadvantage marginalised communities and countries. This thesis challenges the common conception in IRCM that anything can be measured easily and sheds light on the fact that the way measurements are conducted influences the outcomes and as a result can have real-world consequences (e.g., how countries would be ranked according to international collaborative research activities).

This thesis consists of scientific papers that are combined into a larger research project, and is organised into three parts. Part 1 introduces the literature and fundamentals of the research. Part 2 presents empirical studies. Part 3 synthesises the results and features an overall conclusion to the thesis.

Part 1 includes an introductory chapter and literature reviews. The introduction chapter outlines the motivation, questions, and methodology that guide the overall project. Chapter 2 is the literature review chapter, which includes a scoping review study, a main path analysis paper, and a systematic review study. The scoping review can be considered exploratory research to identify the research topics and gaps in the IRCM domain. The main path analysis represents the next step to explore the development of knowledge surrounding these research topics individually. The systematic review inspects the approaches of combining different elements in IRCM.

Part 2 consists of empirical studies of the roles of the three important elements in IRCM: data sources, measures, and indicators. Chapter 3 consists of three scientific papers, each describing a study, that explores the role of data sources in IRCM. The first study establishes a method to resolve and complete authors' country affiliation data in bibliographic records, because missing country affiliation information is a problem for the accuracy of IRCM in both research and practice. The method proposed in that paper is then applied in the empirical studies that follow within the thesis. The second study explores the general effects of data set choices on measuring IRC, and the third study then assesses the quality of bibliographic data sources to evaluate and determine the most suitable data sources for measuring IRC. Chapter 4 then focuses on how the measures impact IRCM results and thus study outcomes, consisting of two papers describing one study each. The first study analyses how two different underlying methods of counting collaborations – whole count and fractional count – affect the results of IRCM. The second study assesses the effect of three approaches to choosing measures of IRC on the results of IRCM - absolute strength, bilateral similarity, and multilateral similarity - in IRCM. Chapter 5 focuses on empirical studies about the role of indicators in IRCM, consisting of two papers (again one study each). The first study examines the effects of different factors on IRC indicators: the country of the collaborators and the discipline of the publication are examined for their effect on asymmetric co-authorship relationships between countries. The second study examines the relationships between the primary indicators of IRC: the co-publications and co-patents are investigated to see how they affect each other over time.

Part 3 comprises a synthesis chapter and a conclusion chapter. Chapter 6 synthesises the roles of different elements and proposes a general measurement model of indicators in IRCM. The thesis concludes with a chapter outlining the conclusions and contributions of the above scientific papers in information science theory, methodology, and practice.