Southeast Asia’s cross-regional research collaborations in the multiplex world: current trends and future paths

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Civic futures in a digital age: Youth activism, cultural resistance, and glocal collaboration in Southeast Asia

Proposal

Short Background

Global research is diversifying, as more small to medium research systems increasingly contribute to knowledge production (Marginson, 2021), and pan-national regions (henceforth regions) are increasingly playing a more active role in contributing to global knowledge (Baker & Powell, 2024; Oldac & Yang, 2023).

As an emerging regional space, Southeast Asia is currently experiencing momentum towards the regional harmonisation of its higher education systems. The development of Southeast Asian nation’s higher education sectors is significant because of the region’s demographic potential for substantial expansion and growing economic footprint. The diverse populations of Southeast Asia aspire to create an inclusive, equitable, and harmonious space that is fully integrated with other regions and nations worldwide. Although much progress is still needed, the meaningful initiatives of ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), which unites ten countries in the region, are important indications of this endeavour. Investigating the connectivity of ASEAN’s higher education systems through their research collaborations is crucial.

Theoretical Framework: An emerging multiplex world and the regional scale in global higher education

Multipolarity arguments in global research system tend to reduce the narrative to a bipolar world, in which the competition between the U.S. and China is emphasised in the higher education literature. The global knowledge production is much more diverse than this. The emerging world knowledge production is likely to be what Acharya calls as a Multiplex one (Acharya, 2024). Multiplex world order indicates that regions around the globe, which come together thanks to the agency of peoples that constitute them, are of increasing importance.

This approach is in line with the multiscalarity arguments in global higher education. Marginson and Rhoades (2002) identified various actors involved in higher education at local, national, and global scales. However, research is not limited to these scales but includes actors at regional, institutional, and individual scales (Oldac & Yang, 2022). These actors in the global research space constantly interact with each other organically, and they are active on more than one scale.

Short Context

With a combined population of over 670 million and a collective gross domestic product of over US$3.6 trillion in 2022 (ASEAN Secretariat, 2023), ASEAN already has a strong footprint in the global society and economy. On top of these, ASEAN continues to grow economically. More relevant to the study, the region has a remarkable higher education scene, accommodating almost 20 million students and more than 7000 universities (Atherton et al., 2018). The region has 32.5% of total population aged between 0-19 (ASEAN Secretariat, 2023), indicating an enormous potential for higher education as these people will head towards university education in time.

Purpose

This study focuses on ASEAN’s regional research system and its cross-regional collaborative publications. Following research questions guided the study:

What are the features of Southeast Asia’s cross-regional research collaborations?
a) What are the major trends in cross-regional collaborations in terms of volumes of co-authored publications with globally- and regionally-relevant actors (actors will be defined in the presentation)?
b) What patterns can be observed about research area-based collaborations?
c) Who bears the initiatives in these collaborations as measured by first authorship data?
d) What is the citation recognition of the collaborative research conducted by Southeast Asian researchers?


Methods Summary

This study builds on bibliometric data to examine the above-stated research question. Bibliometric data is increasingly employed to investigate the international collaborations and publications of national science systems (Chankseliani et al., 2021; Wagner, 2018). The study utilized multiple bibliometric data sources, including data synthesized from the Web of Science database and National Science Board (2023), which uses the Scopus database. The data collected from WoS included journal article meta-data from all WoS indices, including the Emerging Sources Citation Index.

In this study, the collaborative research publication means having at least one author from each system to co-author a paper together. Thus, all the publications analysed in this study have at least one author based in an ASEAN system and the other in the selected collaborating system.

Summary of Findings and Discussion

Overall, the analysis indicates a numeric increase in ASEAN-based authors' collaborations across almost all aspects. However, the findings suggest room for improvement in achieving more equal positioning in the initiative of cross-border collaborations and call for more attention to the impact and recognition of research publications.

Our findings reveal the dynamic nature of cross-regional research collaborations in Southeast Asia, highlighting several important trends. There is a notable increase in collaborations not only with globally relevant research systems but also with regionally relevant actors, such as Australia, India, and South Korea. This growth aligns with the increasing interconnectivity in the Indo-Pacific region, where ASEAN, Australia, India, and Korea are key players.

Contrary to the growth in research collaborations between ASEAN and other Indo-Pacific countries, China, and the EU, the US is falling behind in its collaborations with emerging ASEAN research. Given its capacity for research in the global knowledge system, there is significant scope for the US to engage more with ASEAN-based researchers.

This study also highlights that ASEAN's cross-regional research capacity and willingness to collaborate, as well as research collaboration patterns, seem to be replacing past colonial ties. The cross-regional collaboration patterns found in this study do not support the scholarly arguments about higher collaborations with past colonial masters (Adriansen & Madsen, 2019). Overall, researchers nowadays appear to have more autonomy and opportunities to choose research partners that suit their needs and circumstances, rather than adhering to conventional colonial ties that were more powerful in the past.

Area-based analyses indicate that the region’s collaborations with China focusses on STEM areas, compared to social science and humanities with the EU and medical sciences with the US, highlighting the collaborating authors' capacity and expertise in specific areas.

Findings also indicate that ASEAN-based researchers are unequally positioned in cross-regional collaborations, necessitating policy attention. This could be attributed to unequal power dynamics in the global research system (Marginson & Xu, 2023). Furthermore, consistent with existing discussions, cross-regional collaborations increase citation impact, but there is room to increase citation recognition.

Authors

• Yusuf Ikbal Oldac, Education University of Hong Kong

• Miguel Antonio Lim, The University of Manchester

• Ka Ho Mok, Hang Seng University

• Ly THI Tran, Deakin University

• Lili Yang, The University of Hong Kong

• JACOB OPPONG NKANSAH, Lingnan University