Let’s hear a cheer for collaboration! Here, Indian and Swedish research funds are signing a cooperation agreement. | Image: India Department of Science & Technology

International collaboration is very important in research, especially in the natural sciences. This is why there are countless agreements for funding cooperation between institutions in different countries. But several researchers from Brazil wanted to know just what such international cooperation agreements (ICAs) actually bring to science. So they began investigating the impact of the international collaborations in which the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) was engaged. 

To do this, they conducted a ‘quasi-experimental evaluation’, as they themselves called it. They looked at FAPESP data from 1990 to 2018 and compared the funding provided through international collaborations, both under cooperation agreements and without them.  They found that “ICAs have a positive and significant impact on the quality of scientific production [as] measured by the number of citations, h-index, and the number of national and international papers [with] co-authorship”. They suspect that participating institutions offer greater support in terms of funding, personnel and material when such agreements are in place. What’s more, ICAs “typically involve research teams rather than individual researchers, which can positively influence engagement and commitment”. While this seems a convincing conclusion to draw, the team is insistent that more research is needed to determine the facts.

They did find it surprising that there was no correlation between the ICAs and the number of scientific papers or technological developments resulting from them. Nevertheless, they believe that their results “highlight the relevant role of agreements to leverage a more significant impact of scientific production and foster excellence in research”.