Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on researcher collaboration in business and economics areas on national level: a scientometric analysis
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2022-0030 |
| Published date | 07 June 2022 |
| Date | 07 June 2022 |
| Pages | 183-202 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Robertas Damaševičius,Ligita Zailskaitė-Jakštė |
Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on
researcher collaboration in
business and economics areas on
national level:
a scientometric analysis
Robertas Dama
sevi
cius
Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania, and
Ligita Zailskait_
e-Jak
st_
e
Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania
Abstract
Purpose –The coronavirusdisease 2019 (COVID-19)pandemic has greatly impactedsociety and academiclife
and research practices. This study is an attempt to comprehend whether a global emergency of COVID-19
pandemichas an impact on researcherinternationalcollaboration.The authors analyze the researchcollaboration
beforeand after the beginning of the COVID-19pandemic to understand howscientists collaboratedwithin their
own nation’s borders and beyond.
Design/methodology/approach –The authors analyze the research collaboration before and after the
beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to understand how scientists collaborated within their own nation’s
borders and beyond. The authors collected a dataset of research publications published in journals in the
research area of business and economics and indexed in the WoS Core Collection database by researchers from
11 countries (Austria, Denmark, Greece, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Korea(South), Mexico, Pakistan, Romania and
Vietnam). In total, 14,824 publication records were considered for the literature analysis. This study presented
the scientometric analysis of these publications using bibliometric, statistical, factor analysis and network
analysis methods. The results are evaluated and interpreted in the context of the Hofstede’s model of cultural
dimensions. The results of this study provide evidence to research management to properly allocate their
efforts to improve the researcher cooperation during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and to overcome its
negative outcomes in the years to come.
Findings –The results of our study show that uncertainty avoidance as the cultural factor defined by the
Hofstede’s model has significantly influenced the properties of research collaboration networks in the domain
of business and economics. Uncertainty avoidance focuses on how cultures adapt to changes and cope with
uncertainty, while the global COVID-19 pandemic introduced a lot of change and uncertainty all levels of
society around the world.
Research limitations/implications –The study exclusively examines 14,824 research outputs which have
been indexed in the WoS Core Collection database from 2019 till 15 November 2020 and only covered one
research area (business economics). Thus, documents published in any other different channels and sources
which are not covered in WoS are excluded from this study. The authors have analyzed the publications from
just 11 countries, which represent a small part of the global research output. Also, the Hofstede’s cultural
dimensions model is not a unique way to study cultural characteristics at the national level.
Practical implications –The results of this study will provide evidence to research management to properly
allocate their efforts to improve the researcher cooperation during the still ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and to
overcome its negative outcomes in the years to come.
Originality/value –Considering the global impact and social distress due to the outbreak of COVID-19
pandemic, this study is significant in the present scenario for identifying the changes in the characteristics of
research collaboration networks of 11 diverse (in terms of geographicaldistribution and cultural differences in
Impact of
COVID-19 on
research
collaboration
183
Funding: This research received no external funding.
Data availability statement: Data are available from the corresponding author upon request.
Conflicts of interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 1 February 2022
Revised 12 May 2022
Accepted 16 May 2022
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 79 No. 1, 2023
pp. 183-202
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-02-2022-0030
terms of the Hofstede’s cultural dimensions model) countries between 2019 (the year before COVID-19) and
2020 (the year of COVID-19), which has not been done before.
Keywords Research collaboration, Research productivity, Bibliographic analysis, Scientometrics, COVID-19
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Science has become a team activity with researchers self-organizing into collaborations,
including international-level cooperation (Wagner et al., 2015). International research
collaboration has grown significantly since the 1980s when geopolitical changes have opened
opportunities for previously limited researchers to create relationships outside their own
country or region due to political change and globalization. Collaboration networks have been
credited with more efficient research production and diffusion of research knowledge (Munoz
et al., 2016). While international collaboration can help scientists in one country gain access to
complementary knowledge outside their home country, such collaboration comes with a
search and coordination cost (Bikard et al., 2015). International collaborative research works
like a network, which takes some time to traverse. Although research collaboration can have
many diverse forms such as participation in grant projects, conferences, staff exchange and
informal connections, joint paper publications from authors belonging to different research
institutions and universities is a tangible and measurable indicator of collaboration. By
analyzing the research publications using the bibliometric methods, we can indirectly
analyze the changes in communication flows between researchers.
The challenges raised by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic provide an
opportunity to reexamine global cooperation in research (Buitendijk et al., 2020). The
universities have introduced their measures aimed at supporting innovative ways of virtual
teaching, providing funds for the COVID-related research (Mehta and Ali, 2020). However,
there are still few research studies, how these restrictive measures affected and continue to
affect the cooperation of researchers, especially in research areas that are not directly related
to medicine and health, such as business and economics (Mehta and Ali, 2020). Specifically,
research administrators need to know, how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the research
practices, habits , and cooperation pat terns that are chang ing both nationall y and
internationally. These changes must be interpreted considering the existing cultural
differences in research practices and environments such as studies by the Hofstede’s model of
national cultures (Hofstede et al., 2010). The cultural dimensions of the Hofstede’s model were
demonstrated to significantly predict academic adjustment, specifically power–distance
(negative), masculinity and uncertainty avoidance (both positive) as the primary predictor for
academic success (Rienties and Tempelaar, 2013).
The problem of measuring the results of scientific research in which many scientists are
involved (including those from different countries) has been studied for a long time. The issue
of distribution of shares of international scientific publications between countries has been
considered in De Lange and Gl€
anzel (1997), which demonstrated that bibliometric methods
can be used to study international scientific interactions by recorded trials in different fields
of science at different periods. Fry et al. (2020) found that during COVID-19, the researcher
groups have become smaller on average in published articles. The papers published in the
COVID-19 period have become less likely to be internationally coauthored than before
COVID-19, because of the transaction difficulties involved in remote collaboration in the early
days of the pandemic. Most research is performed while cooperating in research groups and
networks, because more authors can perform better than working independently, and can
provide differing perspectives on the research performed, while enriching the result. While
individual investigators may choose their collaborators under multitude different influences,
at the national level, the cumulative output of investigators can be analyzed statistically
(Hsiehchen et al., 2018).
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