underlying relationships of multi-university collaborations in academics
In the last 30 years, more and more published scientific articles are a result of collaborations between investigators at different universities, which may suggest a dissemination of research beyond the walls of a few elite universities and/or geographic regions. A study published in the Nov. 21st issue of the journal Science finds that increased multi-university collaborations are mostly composed of collaborations between geographically close institutions or between institutions of similar status. It is interesting that collaborations between two elite institution (judged based on the number of citations received by that papers from those institutions) would on average lend greater impact to the work published, while collaborations by lower tier institutions would lead to correspondingly less benefit towards the impact of that work. In fact, collaborations between the universities of the lowest tiers would, on average, slightly decrease the impact of the work. Collaborations between universities of differing prestige would lead to work that has impact between that expected from each university–thus on average it does not benefit groups from more elite universities to collaborate with groups at less prestigious universities. The authors of this study conclude:
“However, whereas the greater geographic interconnectedness of universities would appear to make geography less important, the corresponding intensification of social stratification in multi-university collaboration tends to embed the production of outstanding scientific knowledge in fewer rather than more centers of high-impact science. The dominant role of elite universities suggests several ideas for future research, including scale and resource advantages, social networks, journal leadership, and other factors such as matching based on status or quality, that promote a widening rather than a narrowing of stratification in science through the vehicle of multi-university partnerships.”
Here is the abstract from the study in the Nov. 21st issue of Science:
Multi-University Research Teams: Shifting Impact, Geography, and Stratification in Science
by Benjamin F. Jones, Stefan Wuchty and Brian Uzzi
This paper demonstrates that teamwork in science increasingly spans university boundaries, a dramatic shift in knowledge production that generalizes across virtually all fields of science, engineering, and social science. Moreover, elite universities play a dominant role in this shift. By examining 4.2 million papers published over three decades, we found that multi-university collaborations (i) are the fastest growing type of authorship structure, (ii) produce the highest-impact papers when they include a top-tier university, and (iii) are increasingly stratified by in-group university rank. Despite the rising frequency of research that crosses university boundaries, the intensification of social stratification in multi-university collaborations suggests a concentration of the production of scientific knowledge in fewer rather than more centers of high-impact science.
