“Internationalists” and “Locals” in Research: Similar Productivity Patterns Across Europe

The relationships between international cooperation and research productivity have been widely discussed in research literature, and there is a general assumption that international collaborative activities in research lead to an increase in research productivity. International research collaboration is most often found to be a critical factor in predicting high research productivity. A recent study investigated how strongly international collaboration in research is correlated with higher than average research productivity and whether the relationships found hold across all academic disciplines. Analysis was conducted with reference to two separate groups of academics, termed internationalists and locals. We define “internationalists” as academics indicating their involvement in international research collaboration and “locals” as academics indicating their lack of involvement in it. We used the data created by the global CAP and the European EUROAC projects on the academic profession—“The Changing Academic Profession” and “The Academic Profession in Europe: Responses to Societal Challenges,” respectively. The primary data come from 11 European countries, with 17,211 usable cases