Factors Affecting Researchers’ Collaborative Patterns: A Case Study from Maghreb Universities / Les facteurs affectant les pratiques de collaboration des chercheurs : Une étude de cas des universités maghrébines

Abstract

This article examines the factors affecting researchers’ collaborative behaviour, based on the results of a survey of 285 researchers from three universities in Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia). For each country, results indicate that the majority of researchers prefer to collaborate (in order of preference) with their peers in their own research group, with foreign partners, and with national collaborators from other universities. European partners are preferred in terms of foreign collaboration, followed by researchers from other Maghreb countries. While researchers from the United States of America (USA) and the other Arab countries do not appear to be the preferred partners for Algerian researchers, those from Morocco and Tunisia favour collaboration with their peers from these countries. Results also show that scientific collaboration is mainly developed through personal contacts, and that cooperation agreements between institutions do not seem to stimulate researchers to intensify their scientific collaboration. Finally, over two-thirds of the respondents considered tools such as Skype and social media to be key factors for building and enhancing collaboration, and experienced researchers use these tools more extensively. This article highlights the need for an increased coherence between researchers’ expectations and their universities’ scientific collaboration policies.

Résumé

Le présent article met en exergue, à travers une enquête réalisée auprès de 285 chercheurs appartenant à trois universités du Maroc, d’Algérie et de Tunisie, les différents facteurs qui influencent la collaboration entre les chercheurs maghrébins. Les résultats indiquent que la majorité des chercheurs, dans chacun de ces trois pays, collaborent principalement avec les membres de leur laboratoire, suivis par les partenaires étrangers puis par les collaborateurs nationaux affiliés à d’autres universités. En termes de collaboration avec les partenaires étrangers, l’Europe constitue le premier choix, suivie par les autres pays du Maghreb. Alors que les États-Unis et les pays arabes ne semblent pas être les partenaires privilégiés par les chercheurs algériens, ceux du Maroc et de la Tunisie favorisent la collaboration avec ces pays. Les résultats montrent également que la collaboration scientifique est principalement basée sur les contacts personnels, et que les accords de coopération entre les institutions ne semblent pas fournir aux chercheurs une plateforme qui permet d’intensifier la collaboration scientifique. Enfin, des outils tels que Skype et les médias sociaux ont été considérés par plus des deux tiers des répondants comme un facteur clé dans la construction et l’amélioration de la collaboration, et que les chercheurs expérimentés utilisent ces outils plus largement. Cet article permet aussi de mettre en avant l’importance de la cohérence entre les attentes des chercheurs et les politiques de collaboration des universités et pays.

Introduction

Collaboration is often seen as a key driver for developing countries’ scientific capacity (Wagner et al. 2001; Harris 2004). Scientific collaboration has been highly correlated with research productivity (Melin 2000; Lee and Bozeman 2005; Haslam et al. 2008; Defazio, Lockett, and Wright 2009; Abramo and D’Angelo 2011; Bouabid 2014). Furthermore, Helga Andrade, Ernesto de los Reyes López, and Tomas Bonovia Martín (2009) and Louis-Michel Lebeau and colleagues (2008) demonstrate a positive impact of international and inter-sectorial collaboration (government, industry, and university) on researchers’ scientific impact, while Vincent Larivière and colleagues (2015) show that collaboration has, since the beginning of the twentieth century, been associated with higher scientific impact. A recent survey on science and technology collaboration conducted by Anne Marie Gaillard and colleagues (2013) in the Euro-Mediterranean region showed that scientists aspiring to greater international recognition are more involved in international collaboration. Similarly, a study conducted by Radhamany Sooryamoorthy (2016) in South Africa reveals that collaboration made possible by information technologies contributes significantly to research productivity. Due to this positive relationship between collaboration, productivity, and scientific impact, many funding agencies and research managers encourage open, multidisciplinary, and internationally collaborative science and technology research.

Despite many quantitative analyses of researchers’ collaboration patterns, few studies focus on the factors affecting this behaviour at a micro-level and on the reasons on which it is based. While several researchers have conducted quantitative analyses of collaboration in Africa (for example, Bouabid (2014) in Morocco; Adams et al. (2014) in the entire African continent; Boshoff (2010) in the Southern African Development Community; Onyancha and Maluleka (2011) in sub-Saharan Africa; and Mêgnigbêto (2013) in West Africa), qualitative

Table 1.

Number of papers and growth rate of Maghreb countries in the WoS database

issues and patterns of scientific collaboration in Africa have rarely been addressed (Boshoff 2009; Sooryamoorthy 2016) and typically focus on European countries and on the United States.

While the Maghreb countries may be peripheral actors in the science system, they have adopted—particularly in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia—a strategy for economic development built largely on science and technology, which seems to have worked well.¹ As shown in Table 1, the scientific output of these three countries—measured by the number of papers indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database—increased steadily over the last decade, with a 161 percent growth rate from the period of 2000–04 to 2009–13. One can see that this growth is far greater than the average world increase over the same period (68 percent).

International collaboration activities are also contributing to this growth, as exemplified by the growth rate of papers authored through international collaboration (167 percent). Indeed, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia have been active in the seventh Research and Development Framework Program (FP) of the European Union (EU). More specifically, the number of projects they participated in increased between FP6 and FP7, reaching seventy-four projects for Morocco, sixty-six for Tunisia, and twenty-one for Algeria.² The number of involved institutions also increased with fifty-seven participations for Morocco, sixty-nine for Tunisia, and twenty-one for Algeria. Given that their population of researchers exceeds 87,100 academic staff, Maghreb countries have great potential for future scientific collaborations.

Despite these increases in scientific collaboration, few studies have attempted to gain a better understanding of the factors affecting researchers’ collaboration behaviour (for example, Shrum, Genuth, and Chompalov 2007). This article aims to contribute to this literature by exploring Maghreb researchers’ behavioural patterns and preferences in regard to scientific collaboration as well as analyzing factors that encourage or impede collaborative work. A bibliometric analysis is used in conjunction with a survey to achieve these objectives.

Data and methods

Bibliometric analysis is commonly used to study collaborative patterns of researchers (Melin and Persson 1996; Glänzel and Schubert 2005), despite some criticisms about its shortcomings (for example, Katz and Martin 1997; Laudel 2002). Bibliometric databases such as WoS have their own disadvantages (Roland 2007; Leydesdorff 2008). In addition, African countries often report their findings in local outlets and, therefore, may not be included in the analyses of international bibliometric databases (Pouris and Ho 2014). Nevertheless, it is useful to use data stemming from WoS, given that researchers from Maghreb countries are incentivized to publish in journals indexed in WoS.

To compensate for the aforementioned shortcomings of bibliometric analysis and to focus on behavioural patterns of research collaboration, this article also draws on the results of a questionnaire that was sent via email to researchers associated with three large-size universities in Mahgreb: Frères Mentouri of Constantine in Algeria, Mohammed V of Rabat in Morocco, and Tunis Elmanar in Tunisia. Libya and Mauritania were excluded due to their low research output; only sixty-two articles from Mauritania and 431 from Libya were found in the WoS database for the 2010–12 period, compared to 8,554 from Tunisia, 5,348 from Algeria, and 4,453 from Morocco.

Table 2.

Breakdown of survey respondents by discipline and university

The survey was completed between September and mid-December 2014, with two reminders sent, and it covered the following elements:

• • researcher background:

  • – age;

  • – gender;

  • – professional position;

  • – scientific field.

• • scientific activities

  • – number of papers published during the last five years (in WoS or Scopus);

  • – number of co-authors (either in WoS and Scopus);

  • – degree of preference in collaborating;

  • – basis for collaboration with foreign partners;

  • – preferred foreign partners;

  • – assessment of the drivers promoting collaboration and obstacles that limit it;

  • – assessment of research collaboration results in terms of productivity and impact; and

  • – assessment of the collaborators’ influence on the article topic (see Table 2).

The original questionnaire, in French, can be found in the Appendix at the end of this article. A group of twenty researchers responded to this questionnaire as a pilot operation, which allowed the authors to perform refinements. Then a sample of researchers was built for each of the three universities. The response rate was 61 percent at the University Frères Mentouri, 65 percent at the University Mohammed V of Rabat, and 80 percent at Tunis Elmanar University. Overall, 285 survey responses were collected.

Results and discussion

Age, gender, and scientific field

Figure 1 shows that over two-thirds of the respondents were aged between forty-one and sixty years old, with almost one-third being between the age of fiftyone and sixty. Men represented slightly more than half of the respondents (56 percent).

Figure 1.

Percentage of survey respondents, by age group

Figure 2.

Percentage of survey respondents, by discipline

Table 3.

Number of publications by age group

All scientific disciplines are represented in this survey, albeit to a different extent. More than a quarter of the respondents are biologists, followed by physicists, social scientists, and engineers. Very few researchers were from the environmental sciences, geology, mathematics, and medicine and health sciences (see Figure 2).

Output by age group

Based on Table 3, most respondents produced fewer than five papers in the last five years. As one might expect, the percentage of researchers in each of the different classes of papers is inversely proportional to the number of produced papers. More specifically, almost half of the researchers (47 percent), regardless of their age, published fewer than five papers in the last five years in journals indexed by WoS or Scopus. Only 20 percent have published between six and ten papers. Another major finding from Table 3 is that researchers aged between forty-one and sixty years of age published a higher number of indexed papers and were more productive than those from other age groups. This finding is consistent with the most recent research on the relationship between age and scientific output (Gingras et al. 2008).

Preferences for collaboration

In total, 57 percent of respondents indicated that they preferred collaborating with colleagues from their own research group (or laboratory), as shown in Figure 3. This means that researchers tend to work with their own working group, as described by Barry Bozeman and Elizabeth Corley (2004). Yamini Jha and Eric Welch (2010) have suggested that close personal relationships

Figure 3.

Preferred collaborators, by proximity

Figure 4.

Preferred foreign collaborators, by region

help build personal goodwill and trust and contribute to greater exchange of information or research ideas between researchers, which might be one factor behind such behaviour.

While almost all respondents preferred collaborating with European researchers (with an average of 70 percent), the preference for Maghreb partners is higher for the Tunisian university (54 percent) and lower for the Moroccan university (32 percent) (see Figure 5).

The preference for collaborating with European partners could be explained partly by geographic proximity (Hoekman, Frenken, and Tijssen 2010; Scherngell and Hu 2011; Adams et al. 2014) and by the active participation of Maghreb researchers in different European funding initiatives such as the Research and Development Framework Program, which offers grants for research projects. This is coherent with the co-publications of these three countries, as reported in Table 4. More specifically, among European countries, France is the preferred foreign collaborator in all three Maghreb countries studied in this article (Table 4). France’s prominence is due to factors such as a common language, as French is the official language in the Maghreb countries’ higher education systems. In addition, their cultural and educational background favours similar approaches in conducting research activities (Bouabid, Dalimi, and Cherraj 2013) and collaboration. Finally, the intensity of the collaboration with France may result from their colonial heritage, as all three countries were under French rule for substantial periods (1830–1962 in Algeria; 1912–1956 in Morocco; and 1881–1956 in Tunisia).

Figure 5.

Basis for collaboration with foreign partners

Table 4.

Co-publications by country of the partners (first fifteen countries) (number of co-authored papers in WoS during the period of 2011–13)

Several professors completed higher education degrees or doctoral dissertations in European countries (primarily France) and are still performing research with their former host colleagues. A survey on scientific collaboration in Mediterranean countries conducted by Gaillard and colleagues (2013, 90) concluded that the preferred partners for collaboration for 6 percent of the respondents are “colleagues from the institutions of the countries where they stayed abroad.”

The 2006 Science and Technology Agreement between Morocco and the United States and the successful US Fulbright program (which improves mobility and research collaboration) may explain why the United States is a major foreign partner for Morocco.³ Waleed Sweileh and colleagues (2015), who studied the field of “public environmental and occupational health,” concluded that researchers from Arab countries primarily collaborate with researchers from Europe and North America. They suggest this is because major researchers graduated from, and were trained in, Europe and in the United States and, therefore, have fewer academic and research ties with Asia, Africa, and other regions of the world.

Rationale for collaboration

In Maghreb, scientific collaboration (particularly with foreign partners) is mainly built through personal contacts (78 percent in Morocco, 64 percent in Algeria, and 69 percent in Tunisia), as shown in Figure 5. This supports the idea that scientific collaboration is mostly based on individual initiative, as pointed out by Maria Bordons, Javier Aparicio, and Rodrigo Costas (2013). Collaboration through cooperative projects and research programs is also seen as being important, though to a lesser extent, in building collaborative partnerships (58 percent in Morocco, 30 percent in Algeria, and 47 percent in Tunisia).

In addition to the rationale for collaboration outlined above, a scientific collaboration policy should be a strong driver to strengthen collaboration among researchers. Cooperation agreements (or conventions) are a key component for implementing such a policy. These frameworks may be set at a national institutional level. Unexpectedly, cooperation agreements by institutions do not seem to provide a stimulus for scientific collaboration between researchers, as it is the basis for only 19 percent of the respondents (see Figure 6). It may be explained to a large extent by the lack of clear policies around such scientific cooperation within the universities (fields, countries, institutions, funding, and so on). These arrangements are general frameworks for cooperation rather than specific agreements with fixed targets, time frames, scientific fields, financial support or co-funding, monitoring committee, intellectual property requirements, and so on.

Factors improving collaboration

When asked about the factors promoting scientific collaboration, almost 92 percent of the respondents indicated that affinity between researchers is a strong incentive to build and improve collaboration. Almost all of the respondents (95 percent) recognized the positive role that online tools (such as Skype, social media, and so on) play building and enhancing collaboration, while only 2 percent did not.

Figure 6.

Use of virtual tools to improve collaboration versus age

Figure 7.

Influence of collaborators on research topics

Figure 8.

Collaboration with researchers having a higher number of publications allows (1) access to high-impact journals; (2) enhances scientific reputation

The higher rates are observed for researchers between the ages of thirty-six and sixty years old (Figure 6).

Around 40 percent of respondents indicated that their collaborators influenced the topic of their research (Figure 7). However, Tunisians from the Elmanar University are less influenced (with 44 percent of respondents saying “no”) than their counterparts from Morocco (with only 31 percent of respondents saying “no”).

Regardless of the country, Figure 8 shows that the respondents largely agree on the positive effects of collaboration, such as easier access to high-impact journals and the enhancement of their scientific reputation.

Several researchers mentioned that, while collaboration with colleagues from the same group (unit, laboratory, centre, and so on) is frequent and vital as seen in Figure 3, international visibility, reputation, and publishing in well-known journals are believed to be mostly driven by, and more likely to be acquired through, collaboration with foreign partners. Göran Melin (2000) found that contributions from different researchers increases the research quality. The model used by Antoni Rubí-Barceló (2012) allows for identifying the conditions under which very similar researchers organize themselves in unequal and hierarchical scientific collaboration networks. He adds that the findings follow the core-periphery structure attributed to most scientific collaboration projects.

Conclusion

This article examines several factors affecting researchers’ collaborative behaviour, based on a survey of 285 researchers in three universities in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia from various disciplines. The results are split: 55 percent of the respondents indicated that they prefer to collaborate with their own colleagues (laboratory, research centre, and so on) while 47 percent prefer collaboration with foreign partners. In line with Roland Waast (2010), the survey results indicate that researchers prefer collaborating with their European peers (70 percent of respondents on average). This preference for collaborating with Maghreb partners is higher in Tunisia (54 percent) and lower in Morocco (32 percent). The higher preference for collaborating with European partners could be explained partly by geographic proximity and the active participation of Maghreb researchers in different European funding initiatives such as the Research and Development Framework Program, which offers grants for research projects.

Almost 92 percent of respondents declare that the affinity between researchers is a major factor for stronger collaboration. 95 percent of the respondents considered virtual tools such as Skype, social media, and so on to be another key factor in building and enhancing collaboration. In Maghreb, scientific collaboration, particularly with foreign partners, is mainly built through personal contacts (78 percent in the Moroccan university, 64 percent in the Algerian university, and 69 percent in the Tunisian university), which supports the finding that scientific collaboration is mostly based on individual initiative, as pointed out by previous studies (for example, Bordons, Aparicio, and Costas 2013).

This article advocates for a stronger convergence between researchers’ expectations and universities’ collaboration agreements and the development of a “legal” framework enhancing scientific collaboration. Scientific collaboration is very profitable; 59 percent of respondents agree about the importance of collaboration for highly productive researchers, mostly for increasing access to high-impact journals (58 percent) and for the positive impact it has on their scientific reputations (64 percent). While collaboration with colleagues is frequent (for example, in a research unit, laboratory, centre, and so on), international visibility, reputation, and publishing in well-known journals are believed to be strongly enhanced by collaboration with foreign partners. The latter finding follows the core-periphery structure attributed to most scientific collaboration networks.