Is academia becoming more localised? The growth of regional knowledge networks within international research collaboration

Journal article

Abstract:: It is well-established that the process of learning and capability building is core to economic development and structural transformation. Since knowledge is ‘sticky’, a key component of this process is learning-by-doing, which can be achieved via a variety of mechanisms including international research collaboration. Uncovering significant inter-country research ties using Scopus co-authorship data, we show that within-region collaboration has increased over the past five decades relative to international collaboration. Further supporting this insight, we find that while communities present in the global collaboration network before 2000 were often based on historical geopolitical or colonial lines, in more recent years they increasingly align with a simple partition of countries by regions. These findings are unexpected in light of a presumed continual increase in globalisation, and have significant implications for the design of programmes aimed at promoting international research collaboration and knowledge diffusion.

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Language:: English
Keywords:: FFR

community detection

research collaboration

data visualisation

geopolitics

economic development

knowledge diffusion

country network
Pubs id:: 1180098
Local pid:: pubs:1180098
Deposit date:: 2021-06-03

Copyright holder:: J Fitzgerald et al.
Rights statement:: Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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