Influence of International Collaboration on the Research Impact of Young Universities

Introduction It is widely presumed that international collaboration benefits the researchers and the organisations involved, and enhances the quality of research (Persson, 2010). However, research also suggests that the effects of international collaboration may vary across disciplines and the authors’ countries (Moed, 2005). In this study, we investigated the effect of international collaboration on the impact of publications of selected young universities, and compared to that of renowned old universities. The 5-year citations per paper (CPP) data, the international collaboration rate, the CPP differential between publications with and without international collaborations, and the difference between the percentages of international collaborated publications falling in the global top 10% highly cited publications and the percentage of overall publications falling in the global top 10% highly cited publications (Δ%Top10%) are used as the impact indications. These data are extracted from the Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS) database and Essential Science Indicator (ESI) based on papers published from 2004 to 2013. Young institutions ranked by the 2014 Times Higher Education (THE)’s 100 under 50 Universities are selected in this study, and some renowned universities (> 100 years old) are selected as references for “old universities”. To eliminate the discipline difference effect, the increment of 5-year (2010-2014) field weighted citation impact (FWCI) of internationally collaborated papers over the 5-year overall FWCI of the institutions in SciVal® of Elsevier is used as another indicator. The collaboration among 8 old institutions and 8 young institutions are investigated.