The Influence of International Scientific Collaboration with English-speaking Countries on the Research Performance of Brazilian Academic Institutions

Abstract

Scientific collaboration, a practice that traces its roots back to the birth of modern science, has spread through the research community, expanding the ties between institutions and countries and becoming a strategy to improve research productivity. Collaboration with institutions from countries of renowned scientific leadership thus constitutes a clear opportunity for the scientific advancement of academics as well as institutions worldwide. This work focuses on the set of Brazilian papers indexed by InCites between 2010-2019 to analyze the advantages, measured in terms of the citation impact and percentage of publications in Q1 journals, as well as (just for the papers published between 2014 and 2018) the position in the ARWU Global Ranking of Academic Subjects, derived from the sustained scientific collaboration with institutions from Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, and the United States. Our results show that collaboration with these four countries presents clear advantages for Brazilian institutions in all areas of knowledge. In particular, our study shows that the percentage of publications in Q1 journals doubles, and the citation impact increases markedly for the set of papers in collaboration with the aforementioned countries. Our study also shows that, by and large, Brazilian academic institutions benefit from these international collaborations to improve their positions in the current edition of the ARWU Global Ranking of Academic Subjects.