Research Collaboration Patterns of Highly Cited Researchers in Brazil

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday VI)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Moving beyond ‘north’ and ‘south’ in international research collaboration

Proposal

This study investigates the international collaboration patterns of highly cited researchers in Brazil. The research provides a quantitative analysis of collaboration publication output of nine researchers from the 2018 Highly Cited Researchers rank with current primary affiliation to a Brazilian university. Information on all published articles across the academic career of the highly cited researchers was collected from Science Citation Index (a total of 1599 publications). An analysis of all the publications shows that the number of international collaboration links is positively associated with the number of citations and with highly cited papers.

The study shows that North-South collaborations are more common than South-South collaborations among highly cited researchers. The highest number of collaboration links are with the United States (6.5%), England (3.3%), and Germany (3.3%). Within Latin America, researchers collaborated most with Mexico (1.7%), Argentina (1.4%), and Chile (1.4%). Moreover, the number of collaborations with Latin American countries were common within larger collaborations that included North-American and European countries.

Three general trends of collaboration patterns were observed. First, global researchers had more than 500 collaboration links with at least 50 countries, and most highly cited papers were international. Second, international researchers had collaborated with 20 to 50 countries with both domestic and international highly cited papers. Third, domestic researchers had collaboration links with less than 10 countries and most of their highly cited papers were domestic. Combining additional findings from background information of each researcher, the study provide factors that might influence choices of research collaborations. Moreover, I will show how different collaboration patterns influence choices of North-South and South-South collaboration.

Author

• Magdalena Martinez, Ontario Institute for the Studies of Education, University of Toronto