Assessing the Impact of International Research Collaboration on Research Productivity in Academia of Pakistan

Abstract

This quantitative research paper explores the international research collaborations and their contribution to enhance the research productivity in the academia of Pakistan. The study has taken the academic staff of five major public universities i.e. Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, University of the Punjab Lahore, University of Peshawar, University of Karachi and University of Balochistan Quetta as the study sample. International collaboration is the independent variable, and the dependent variables are research productivity, research publications, citation impact, conferencing involvement, funded research projects, number of co-authored international publications, research quality and academic visibility. This involved a sample of 250 academic staff members who were used to illustrate a fully quantitative SPSS based analysis. Data have been arranged descriptively, and by using Pearson correlation. When comparing the descriptive findings, knowledge access, project participation, citation impact, financial support, project timeline, research quality, and academic reputation were found to be positively valued by faculty, while several items had a high degree of disagreement on the equal access to knowledge and support of indexed journals, barriers to project participation, and institutional ranking. The result of the correlation analysis indicates that there are clear positive relationships between international cooperation with the indicators of the research productivity, namely research productivity, research publications, funded projects, research quality. International cooperation also appeared to have a powerful effect on research productivity and its academic products, as revealed by the results. When facilitated by equity of access, institutional support, grant writing assistance and ethical co-authorship, the study finds that international collaboration is a viable tool to enhance research performance.

Keywords: Academia; collaboration; research productivity; research projects; research quality.