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1. introduction: rising research collaboration in global science, 2. characterizing international research collaborations: benefits, motivations, and challenges, 3. autoethnographic case study: objects, methods, and data sources, 4. case study of an irc project in the sociology of science, 5. reflections on the benefits, motivations, and challenges of irc, 6. discussion and conclusion, acknowledgements.

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Benefits, Motivations, and Challenges of International Collaborative Research: A Sociology of Science Case Study

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Jennifer Dusdal, Justin J W Powell, Benefits, Motivations, and Challenges of International Collaborative Research: A Sociology of Science Case Study, Science and Public Policy , Volume 48, Issue 2, April 2021, Pages 235–245, https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scab010

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Contemporary science is marked by expanding and diverse forms of teamwork. Collaboration across organizational and cultural boundaries extends the possibilities of discovery. International collaborative research projects often provide findings beyond what one team could achieve alone. Motivated to maintain existing relationships and grow their scientific network, researchers increasingly collaborate, despite often unrecognized or underappreciated costs, since such projects are challenging to manage and carry out. Rarely studied in-depth and longitudinally, the perspectives of scientific team members are crucial to better understand the dynamics of durable collaboration networks. Thus, this retrospective case study of a sociology of science project applies the novel method of autoethnography to examine teamwork benefits, motivations, and challenges. Key challenges found include spatial distance and differences of culture, language, and career stage. This study, spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, focused on collaborators’ characteristics and evolving perceptions of team dynamics over a decade.

Contemporary science is marked by expanding and diverse forms of teamwork. Collaborations across organizational, disciplinary, and cultural boundaries extend the possibilities of discovery, despite often unrecognized or underappreciated costs (see Hicks and Katz 1996 ; Leahey 2016 ). Currently, competition on multiple levels transforms universities ( Musselin 2018 ) as individual and collective actors are simultaneously embedded in diverse nested and interdependent competitions ( Krücken 2019 ). This is mediated through formal evaluations, performance measures, and continuously generated comparative indicators that increasingly target collaboration ( Powell 2020 ). To succeed in this learning race to achieve new knowledge, participation in networks and interorganizational linkages, with continuous communication and collaborations of different sorts, will be crucial to success ( Powell 1998 ). Yet both collaborative and internationally comparative research projects are more complex; with the principles of ideal research designs more difficult to achieve—and such teamwork demanding ( Kosmützky 2018 ; Wöhlert 2020 ). Data from different national contexts must be gathered and compared, taking into account that team members in research projects may have contrasting cultural and disciplinary backgrounds; furthermore, they work within specific organizational conditions for conducting research ( Dusdal et al. 2019 ). While most research projects are not explicitly comparative, considering collaborative research’s exponential growth since the mid-1990s ( Powell et al. 2017a ), more attention is now devoted to (international) research collaborations (e.g. Hicks and Katz 1996 ; Shrum et al. 2007 ; Anderson and Steneck 2011 ; Jeong et al. 2014 ; Jeong and Choi 2015 ; Ulnicane 2015 ; Edelenbos et al. 2017;  , Wagner 2018 ). The meanings of international collaboration ( Bozeman et al. 2013 : 2ff) extend beyond the foundational definition: ‘working together of individuals to achieve a common goal of producing new scientific knowledge’ ( Katz and Martin 1997 : 7). As just one of myriad collaboration outcomes, coauthored publications, visible and measurable, have become the standard, though conservative, indicator of increasing research collaboration.

Several waves of studies on international research collaborations (IRC) have focused on drivers, patterns, effects, networks, and measurement. In case studies of ‘big science’ collaborations, Shrum et al. (2007) emphasize technology, data, organization, and trust. Kwiek (2020) shows that IRCs are a powerful stratifying force that distinguishes locally-oriented from internationally-oriented researchers in terms of their coauthorships and scientific productivity. Chen et al. (2019) identify key topics for future IRC research: to compare IRC properties and variance; to investigate networks; and to develop measures to assess costs and benefits. Despite the continued exponential rise of collaboration across the sciences, IRCs that extend beyond the usual timeframe of a project have rarely been studied in-depth to understand evolving researcher interactions and relationships ( Ulnicane 2015 ). Indeed, long-term relationships between collaborators and internal, team-level factors remain the ‘black-box of collaboration study’ ( Jeong and Choi 2015 : 460). Examining such factors, Bozeman et al. (2016 : 226) interviewed dozens of researchers to develop a ‘subjectivist conception of collaboration effectiveness’ to uncover collaboration dynamics relating to field/discipline, collaborator characteristics, and team management. Similarly, we also follow Kollasch’s (2012 : 173) call to examine hierarchical and horizontal relations to understand the ties that bind together international teams. Empirical studies on communication within intercultural research teams and impact on research processes themselves are also rare ( Kaden 2009 ; Wöhlert 2020 ). Notable exceptions include the laboratory studies by Latour and Woolgar (1979) and Knorr-Cetina (1981) , yet these classics illuminated laboratories in STEM fields, closed environments in which collaboration challenges across great distances or in different organizational contexts were not central.

Because researchers face multiple challenges when they work together, explicit reflection of such processes is necessary—especially as the majority of research in many disciplines is now collaboratively conducted and publications coauthored. The emerging field of ‘science of team science’ focuses on micro-level studies of research teams and their interactions (see, e.g. Tartas and Muller Mirza 2007 ; Fiore 2008 ; Slipersæter and Aksnes 2008 ; Thomas et al. 2009 ; Brewster et al. 2011 ; Falk-Krzesinski et al. 2011 ; Esser and Hanitzsch 2012 ; Brew et al. 2013 ; Hoffman et al. 2014 ; Sugden and Punch 2014 ). Studies mainly focus on natural sciences, life sciences, and engineering (see Wagner 2005 ; Gardner et al. 2012 ; Gray et al. 2012 ; Wang et al. 2014 ; Zhai et al. 2014 ; Zdravkovic et al. 2016 ), far less on social sciences and humanities. Specificities of IRC in these other fields remain underexplored ( Reichmann 2013 ; for reviews, see Kosmützky 2018 ; Wöhlert 2020 ). Such research must also reflect specific methodological complications and the social complexity of diverse research teams conducting international and intercultural work, studied thoroughly neither in higher education research nor in sociology of science ( Kosmützky 2017 : 77ff.). This reflects the limited internationalization of social sciences ( Kurzman 2017 ; Stevens et al. 2018 ). Case studies of team processes are relatively rare (but see Kumar 1985 ; Moody 2004 ; Hanges et al. 2005 ; Albert et al. 2015 ; Levitt 2015 ; Okamoto 2015 ). Longitudinal studies are even more unusual (but see Ulnicane 2015 on cases in nanoscience and technology).

To understand varying benefits, motivations, and challenges of IRC, it is essential to analyze evolving relationships of involved scientists and organizations ( Wöhlert 2020 ). Thus, we carried out a case study of teamwork within a highly international, multicultural research team in the sociology of science. This autoethnographic case study emphasizes cultural differences, including intercultural communication. Documentary analysis, several rounds of interviews, and a retrospective survey provide reflections and insights on the aspects of teamwork and divisions of labor among team members at different career stages working in universities in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. The study longitudinally explored benefits, motivations, and challenges that researchers from diverse cultures and at different career stages experienced within an international collaborative research team.

Next, we outline known benefits, motivations, and challenges of IRC. Then, we present our retrospective autoethnographic analysis of team dynamics in this case study and its implications. Finally, we discuss how science policymakers could better support IRCs as the increasingly crucial mode of producing new scientific knowledge.

International research collaborations have increased in volume and importance, responding to higher education expansion and the advancement of knowledge as well as the increasing professionalization and specialization of science. Further factors include rising investments, easier access to (financial) resources, an association with the scientific elite, mutual intellectual or social influences, increased scientific productivity, easier and less expensive communication, and exchange programs ( Luukkonen et al. 1992 ; Dusdal et al. 2019 ). Although it is far from simple and takes innumerable forms, collaboration has become taken-for-granted. Collaborative networks and relationships between organizations and researchers are difficult to study, especially given their complexity and the primacy accorded individual scientists. Conventionally, collaboration has been measured through coauthored publications because such outputs are readily accessible, whereas the dynamics and subjective experiences of collaboration remain largely hidden (but see Shrum et al. 2007 ).

Scientific collaborations—with the goal to achieve new scientific knowledge that cannot be generated by one researcher alone ( Katz and Martin 1997 ; Bozeman et al. 2013 )—often begin informally, establishing trust between researchers meeting in face-to-face situations ( Jeong et al. 2014 ). Long-standing collaborations reflect helpful ‘collaboration management strategies’ and good ‘work-style fit’ ( Bozeman et al. 2016 : 232) along with shared understandings of disciplinary norms. Depending on the field and team constellations, collaborations may be driven by ideas, questions, and theories; equipment and resources; or data ( Wagner 2005 ).

As scientists increasingly work in teams, they need to meet, understand, cooperate, and collaborate—doing so for myriad reasons ( Beaver 2001 ). In some fields, research has become so complex that individual scientists cannot achieve meaningful results without collaborating—the so-called collaboration imperative ( Bozeman and Boardman 2014 : 1). Shared infrastructure also facilitates collaboration. Today’s modal paper in the natural and social sciences represents the work of multiple researchers, often working in different organizational and cultural contexts. This collective shift toward teamwork ( Adams 2013 ; Fortunato et al. 2018 ), and the implied division of labor and specialization, extends from fundamental research to the applied world of patents ( Wuchty et al. 2007 ; Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras 2013 ).#

Collaboration occurs on multiple levels that need to be distinguished ( Kosmützky 2017 : 54ff.). As intrinsically social processes that are difficult to define and operationalize, collaboration takes on many forms; few are explicit: providing infrastructure and services, managing the division of labor or transmitting know-how ( Jeong et al. 2014 : 521f.). In combination with scientific motives, social purposes, even friendship, are often mentioned. Agreeing on research aims, distributing tasks fairly, and maintaining communication are key components of successful long-term collaborations ( Melin 2000 ; Ulnicane 2015 ). Further, to maintain and renew long-term (international) collaborations, it is important to include younger researchers and others with new ideas and relevant skills.

2.1 Determinants of successful international research collaboration

Individuals’ knowledge, experience, and reputation are crucial in producing and publishing scientific knowledge, with the career stage crucial for successfully carrying out diverse roles within IRCs ( Bozeman et al. 2016 : 233). Senior scientists tend to have larger networks and access to resources. They have established their reputations and mentored younger scholars ( Jeong and Choi 2015 ). Long-term collaborations may remain creative and productive long-term due to understanding different work commitments, crediting contributions correctly, and negotiating conflicts ( Bozeman et al. 2016 : 237). Existing relationships, repeated interactions, and intellectual synergies provide the basis for durable collaboration networks ( Ulnicane 2015 : 433f). Our case study demonstrates this.

2.2 Benefits of international research collaboration

As most collaborations begin informally and grow gradually, analyses must attend to social and cultural aspects as well as constraining and enabling factors within different science systems and research organizations—and on the team level ( Leahey 2016 ). Collaboration has many consequences; the results are mixed ( Beaver 2013 ). Some conclude that the proportion of high-quality papers increases with more authors per paper ( Lawani 1986 ). Fanelli and Larivière (2016) argue that while total published papers have increased, individual publication rates, based on the number of first-author papers, or by measuring publications fractionally, have not. IRCs are associated with higher-quality research than national collaborations; internationally coauthored papers tend to have greater research impact ( Rigby and Edler 2005 ; Levitt and Thewall 2010 ; Adams 2013 ). Thus, the numerous benefits of collaborative work justify IRC ( Rigby 2009 ). Many of these benefits were, ultimately, confirmed in our case study.

2.3 Motivations of international research collaboration

Researchers obviously collaborate for innumerable reasons (see Beaver 2001 , 2013 : 50f.; Sonnenwald 2007 ). Motivations include research organization and researcher reputation, higher visibility, opportunities for multidisciplinary research, access to research funds, and mentoring of younger researchers. Development of new methods and sharing knowledge, equipment, laboratories, or (big science) infrastructures, including data, encourage researchers to collaborate, in the process extending their networks. More personal reasons include friendships with chosen colleagues, intrinsic motivation, or the ambition to maximize personal scientific output (see Conchi and Michels 2014 ). In this case study, we analyze which of these motivations were central.

2.4 Challenges of international research collaboration

International and culturally diverse research projects provide valuable opportunities to advance scientific knowledge production, yet also imply challenges, risks, and drawbacks ( Kosmützky 2018 ). The advantage of joining forces and finding synergies of expertise incorporates the risk of invisibility of single researchers within the larger team. Particularly, younger researchers’ contributions may be subsumed. Principal investigators may not be involved in the day-to-day research because their main responsibility is to compete for funding and manage teams. Likewise, IRCs are time-consuming, requiring administration, coordination, and continuous exchange among teams ( Beaver 2013 : 53) as well as intercultural and interpersonal agreements on goals. Tasks must be distributed and responsibilities fulfilled, individually or in constellations ( Easterby-Smith and Malina 1999 ). Handling communication challenges, especially when scientists work in different locations over long time periods, demands clear communication styles to create understanding, trust, and sensitivity; advanced social planning; and functioning technological supports ( Livingston 2003 ). In particular, ‘spatially dispersed scientific collaborations’ demand substantial coordination to effectively bring ideas and expertise together ( Cummings and Kiesler 2005 : 704). Melkers and Kiopa (2010) identify the research gaps of social interactions and researcher engagement in IRCs. Thus, our retrospective case study gathers autoethnographic insights from team members.

IRCs, especially on team level, can be analyzed, categorized, and explored in different ways ( Beaver 2013 : 45ff). Less often studied, spatially distributed teams must deal with multiple methodological and sociocultural complexities that differentiate them from local teams ( Kosmützky 2017 ). To address this research gap, we explore the potential of autoethnography, as this newer approach has been applied to facilitate explicit reflection of research processes. We chose this method to retrospectively guide research and provide insights into the evolving experiences and perspectives of IRC team members. This enables the reconstruction of the discontinuous, sometimes disorganized , work within a multicultural team across four continents. Over a decade, the team constituted itself, carried out research together, and published findings that any one regional team could not have accomplished alone. This approach encourages reflexivity about experiences and valorizes personal narratives—to make sense of the meanings that we researchers retrospectively ascribe to extensive collaboration processes across different stages of career development. While not generalizable, this retrospective, self-reflexive autoethnography synthesizes lessons learned and risks in carrying out IRCs, focusing on team dynamics.

Autoethnography, as a research method, uses researchers’ own experiences in describing and evaluating beliefs, practices, and experiences in particular contexts; it recognizes and values researchers’ social embeddedness. More than a method, it not only describes research processes but simultaneously serves as the product of research ( Ellis et al. 2010 ; Adams et al. 2015 : 21ff). In contrast to claims that research should be neutral, impersonal, and objective ( Delamont 2009 ), autoethnography acknowledges and uncovers often hidden but important drivers of social research, namely subjectivity and personal connections. Such relationships are difficult to observe with standard methods in science of science, such as scientometrics, which measure only the most visible results of collaboration. Methodologically, autoethnography combines content analysis of documents with interviews to support retrospection ( Ellis et al. 2010 ). Personal experiences are connected with the current state of research ( Ronai 1992 ). These generative benefits are balanced by challenges, including lack of theorizing, self-centeredness or insufficient self-criticism, and too few observations ( Ellis et al. 2010 ).

To avoid these pitfalls, alongside our reflections and evaluation of the project collaborations, the study was conceptualized as an analysis using multiple methods to gather data longitudinally. Conducted by two members of the Europe-based subteam over a four-year period, the study includes (1) document analysis, (2) guided autoethnographic interviews, and (3) a retrospective survey of project researchers and managers eight years after project start. Exploring the use of this newer approach in this research field helps us to uncover aspects of IRCs often unobserved when conducting standard expert interviews or participant observations of a ‘foreign’ research team.

The decision to study our own research collaboration was taken after the project officially ended; follow-up projects were in the planning stages. In-depth interviews were carried out with a small number of team members (four) from different status groups (principal investigator, project manager, doctoral student) and cultural backgrounds (North America, Europe, East Asia) in person or virtually. In 2016, document-based sources, including official project documentation, research and administrative notes, official communications with the funding agency and partner universities spanning the Northern hemisphere, and innumerable project and personal e-mails were collected, sorted, and selected. Most materials were collected from project folders stored for joint use. Furthermore, we retrieved dozens of communications from our own e-mail archives.

The study gathered interview extracts and voices from project members from all regional subteams. Guiding themes and topics included the following:

Motivation and experience: Why did you decide to join the research project? Please share your experiences.

Research and learning: What were your research goals and questions within the project? What did you learn?

International collaboration: How do you define ‘international collaboration’. What dis/advantages or costs and benefits did working in a highly international, diverse team have for you? Would you like to work in such a project again? Why (not)?

After transcription, results were synthesized, with key points illustrated below. To enable renewed reflections from team members’ evolving retrospective standpoints eight years after project begin, a follow-up survey on selected findings and focused on benefits, motivations, and challenges of IRC was conducted in August 2020. This included an extensive table of statements ranked by the participants (see Table 1 ). We sent the questionnaire to the whole team; five members responded. Thus, a majority of (former) team members participated in at least one phase of our autoethnographic study. Their responses manifest different perspectives and team-connectedness after the project’s official end. Half of the original team members, from different world regions and in different career stages, continue to actively collaborate and co-author papers.

Benefits, motivations, and challenges of international research collaborations.

Source : Authors’ representation.

We now turn to an overview of the project’s genesis, team size, duration, and budget; its members’ cultural diversity and career stages; patterns of mobility, distribution of labor, and leadership; and the team’s sociodemographic and academic characteristics. Then, we delve into the subjective meanings associated with this IRC, derived from team members’ perspectives.

First ideas about possible transatlantic research collaboration were explored in Summer 2010 by a small group of researchers—later project principal investigators (PIs)—after an international workshop on higher education (HE) in Germany. From two countries and of three generations, they had known each other for ten to twenty years and developed friendships. After another year informally discussing common research interests, more concrete project ideas emerged: to analyze (1) worldwide HE expansion, (2) its consequences for scientific research over the twentieth century, and (3) universities’ contributions to scientific discovery. These interests were then aligned to the explicit economy-centered interests of the funding agency’s call for proposals. A focus on scientific productivity emerged, with the explicit use of this language exemplifying ‘programmification’—the impact of funding agencies’ priorities on proposed research (see Zapp et al. 2018 ). A more detailed project proposal, written with a colleague who had direct contact with the funding agency, was submitted in December 2011. Half a year later, this ‘local’ PI received the five anonymous peer reviews and the first approval notification. On 15 May 2012, he informed his collaborators via e-mail across the time zones:

Hi Team: I just heard a few minutes ago that QNRF approved our application for funding. That’s about all I know at the moment. Stay tuned for more information in the coming weeks. In the meantime, congratulations on a job well done. Let the games begin…(PI 2).

In fact, the to-be-assembled project team would be built upon decades-old relationships, coupled with global recruitment of country experts and young researchers—through existing networks that reflect internationalization powered by doctoral education in research universities; in this case, an American public university with substantially international graduate student population ( Fernandez et al. 2020 ). Among the main purposes of collaboration is the division of labor ( Katz and Martin 1997 ). But as science has evolved and spread around the world, researchers are even more broadly scattered geographically than in earlier eras. Here, IRC networks served as a ‘vehicle for knowledge diffusion’ ( Jeong and Choi 2015 : 462), for access to funding, and for recruitment. Due to this projects’s spatial distribution of researchers across four continents, information exchange, discussion of research goals among subteams, division of labor, and task coordination were crucial (see Lewis et al. 2012 ). All team members were employed in universities of the Northern hemisphere, distributed across seven countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia.

4.1 Team size, budget, and project duration

The team size, budget, and project duration are interrelated, because substantial financial resources are necessary to enable project investigators to form and maintain IRC teams ( Jeong and Choi 2015 : 462). Larger teams may develop contemporary and popular ideas, but have short-lived impact, on average, yet this persists longer when younger researchers are well-integrated ( Wu et al. 2019 ). By contrast, smaller teams may positively irritate science and technology studies with more radical ideas and survive longer when they build a stable core of researchers that remain active ( Palla et al. 2007 ; Fortunato et al. 2018 ). Larger international teams support visibility and information exchange in various contexts, facilitating network growth ( Horta and Austin Lacy 2011 : 459f.). The team studied consisted of ten researchers (full professors, associate professors, doctoral students), one research director, one project manager, and numerous research assistants (in several countries).

Most members participated without their positions being (fully) project-funded; thus, co-financing by research universities was essential. The budget of about US$600,000 was used mainly to fund a project manager and research stays, travel, and data acquisition. Years later, residual overhead costs supported publishing results open access. Particularly, given the brief two-year official project duration, university co-sponsorship was substantial. Financially and in terms of team size, this project was relatively small for such a globe-spanning project compared with, for example, international projects funded by the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. While a no-cost six-month extension was granted, no publications based on the project’s big data and bibliometric analyses appeared during the grant period. In years since, research by various team members has appeared in book and article forms, in English and German, and won numerous awards. The project context also provided an important platform to present previously conducted research to gain visibility in other scientific communities.

4.2 Cultural and linguistic diversity and gender

The group’s national, cultural, and linguistic diversity was considerable: starting with the project’s lead PI in North America, four team members were US citizens. Three team members, representing Europe, came from Germany and Romania, and one each came from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Day-to-day project management was organized in Qatar by a woman from Iran. With the on-going and increasingly rapid globalization of science, researchers seek opportunities outside their country of origin; unsurprisingly, country of origin and current location were often different ( Anderson and Steneck 2011 ). Indeed, most team members were officially employed and/or enrolled outside their country of origin. The most common languages spoken were English, the main project language, German, and Chinese (Mandarin).

Noteworthy, the ratio of female/male researchers was 1:10, whereas project support and research assistance were provided mainly by female team members. If research shows that female scientists have different communication and leadership styles ( Jeong and Choi 2015 ), in this team gender issues were never discussed explicitly.

4.3 Division of labor and career stage

Beyond gender, differences in career stage and power relations among researchers of various status and cultural backgrounds existed. Hierarchies affected communication—from knowledge exchange to critique—as well as expectations ( Roelcke 2010 ; Kosmützky 2018 ). While project leaders often lack professional training in managing international projects, learning their skills ‘on the job’ ( Hantrais 2009 ), this was not so here: the project and ‘Subteam North America’ were led by a renowned senior scientist from that region with long-standing contact to all network members. He selected most team members, many of whom he had trained, collaborated with, or hosted at his university. The core group of PIs, well-connected for over a decade, included a former doctoral student who acted as crucial local contact securing project funding; he led ‘Subteam Middle East’. This confirms that ‘established social capital’ is necessary to successfully recruit diverse researchers from abroad to collaborate ( Melkers and Kiopa 2010 : 391). The involved subteams and their relationships reflect the extensive social interactions necessary for successful collaboration. IRC teams are increasingly the norm, but building international, intergenerational networks that provide collaboration opportunities demand tenacity.

North America is a significant partner for IRCs because of its scientific outputs and central position in global science ( Luukkonen et al. 1992 ; Powell et al. 2017a ). Culturally diverse, ‘Subteam North America’ consisted of Americans and both professors and doctoral candidates from China, Korea, and Taiwan working together at a large US research university. This subteam prepared and maintained the huge volume of raw data—Web of Science Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE)—purchased from Thomson Reuters (now: Clarivate Analytics).

This database was painstakingly recoded by ‘Subteam Europe’, evolving to ensure overall data quality and meet project goals. Contributing four European case studies, this subteam integrated several senior researchers and organized a concluding international conference panel, an important step toward an edited volume collecting all country case studies ( Powell et al. 2017a ). Cultural and linguistic diversity as well as recruitment of additional experts later on ensured that the country case studies of the key science-producing regions were contributed by authors able to review domestic literature and with extensive knowledge of HE and science systems.

‘Subteam Middle East’ provided project management infrastructure and hosted all team members during three workshops. These meetings were organized from and took place in Qatar, where the funding agency required two-thirds of the project budget to be spent. Coordination by the project managers was essential to realize project goals between these rare gatherings in person.

Team members from four East Asian countries delved into national case analysis, less so explicit comparative work. These members had genuine interests and expertise in big data, taking responsibility for substantial encoding, cleaning, and preparation of the dataset for common use, and the development of methods and tools for subsequent analyses. One Asian PI, trained in and a professor in North America, coauthored the analysis of his country of origin with external collaborators. An assistant professor based in another Asian country worked on his case study alone but compared journal coverage of Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus to capture differences in selectivity of the two leading bibliometric databases. Analysis of the third and fourth Asian countries was completed in dissertations by doctoral candidates in ‘Subteam North America’, who had intermittently joined ‘Subteam Middle East’ to work on the dataset. Post-project, they returned to their East Asian countries but completed their dissertations under supervision of the project’s lead PI in the US.

4.4 Mobility

Highly mobile, the project team consisted of members of different national origins, with half of the senior PIs and all doctoral candidates working in research universities in countries other than their country of origin. Various sub-teams collaborated on different aspects and in different phases, meeting in their university or region. Particularly, the doctoral candidates—whether Asian or European—were mobile regarding both their doctoral degree granting universities and in conducting data preparation and analysis in third countries. Only three face-to-face meetings of all members occurred during the project, due to physical distance and costs (coordination, travel).The kickoff meeting was held in February 2013 in Doha, Qatar, whose national research foundation (QNRF) funded the research. This was followed by a second meeting and international conference visit and presentation of first results in November 2013. Finally, a third meeting was conceived as a ‘data workshop’ in March 2014, designed for discussion of discovered historical trends and global findings—such as the exponential rise of (international) coauthorship. Most members attended and presented findings during an international conference in Washington, DC, in March 2015, to engage in cross-disciplinary dialogue, an important but rare opportunity to meet in person ( Melkers and Kiopa 2010 : 397f.). To tackle this challenge in practice, the team organized monthly virtual meetings and communicated continuously via e-mail. Reflecting on the project, members missed personal and on-site communication between subteams. Clarifying problems took much more time than if all researchers had been locally-based, for example writing innumerable e-mails to discuss an issue related to a STATA do-file, instead of walking down the hallway to immediately clarify face-to-face. Thus, research stays by all three doctoral candidates in other subteams were crucial.

4.5 Communication and language

Doing research and producing knowledge in the lingua franca are everyday activities globally, but working in multilingual teams results in communication challenges, especially when team members aspire to publish in (leading) peer-reviewed journals ( Wöhlert 2020 ). Although English was the common project language ( Pelikan 2015 ), only three team members were native speakers. This cultural diversity became particularly obvious when analyzing project documents. Most researchers used their first language for their own research notes, but shared documents and official communications, conference presentations, and publications were mainly written in global English. The team division of labor led to diverse languages being used. Wells (2013) argues that using English as the project language gives native speakers a great advantage to express themselves linguistically, culturally, and socially. Non-native speakers felt inhibited in team interactions (see Bagshaw et al. 2007 ), but even more so in drafting publications later, overcome only through considerable investments by the native speakers in writing and proofreading. Senior scholars’ openness and patience and inclusivity were crucial for project development and facilitating the publication of results in leading English-language journals.

Nevertheless, the team’s diverse cultural, disciplinary, and academic backgrounds resulted in communication problems, both in theoretical debates and in data analysis and interpretation. Analysis of team correspondence emphasized the importance of discussing and agreeing on definitions of key terms, debating theoretical approaches, and selecting methodologies—also to develop mutual understanding and trust, which is vital for successful IRCs ( Bracken and Oughton 2006 ). Because the project strove to combine quantitative and in-depth institutional analyses, increased attention to intercultural communication would have been crucial; these challenges were underestimated.

Although the project officially ended in June 2015, after a no-cost extension, and the final report was submitted in August 2015, the research team continued to collaborate. Since then, numerous publications by diverse team member constellations have appeared, including an edited volume of contributions from regional subteams ( Powell et al. 2017a ) that won several awards. That book’s introduction was jointly written by team members from different locations and career stages to frame the country case studies and synthesize global trends ( Powell et al. 2017b ). By the end of 2020, six peer-reviewed research articles in high-quality journals had appeared. A monograph (awarded a prestigious dissertation prize) appeared in German ( Dusdal 2018 ); another book (in English) is forthcoming ( Baker and Powell, forthcoming ). Three book chapters have been published (in English; two translated into Arabic), two encyclopedia entries, one commissioned report (available in English and French), one contribution to published conference proceedings, and six transfer publications (newspaper articles, interviews, radio, and electronic media such as podcasts). Currently, three additional journal articles using the project database are under review. The project’s three doctoral candidates successfully defended their dissertations (two in 2017, 2019). These outputs and a follow-up project build upon the team members’ joint efforts to construct one of the largest longitudinal bibliometric databases, covering about 90 million entries across a 111-year period. Having specified the project’s characteristics and dynamics, we next present reflections from the autoethnographic study on the team members’ perceived benefits, motivations, and challenges of IRC.

Turning to our autoethnography, we present empirical results based on reflections and insights on conducting research, the division of labor, and social relationships in a globe-spanning project. We discuss what autoethnography may contribute to our better understanding of diverse benefits, motivations, and challenges of IRC.

The study emphasized relationships between members of different cultural, disciplinary, and status backgrounds, uncovering how crucial were the established relationships—spanning three continents and multiple generations—among the project’s PIs.

International cooperation for me is when scholars from different national backgrounds focus on one big research topic and the collaboration, which means they really could help each other to figure it out (PhD 1). On the one hand, people would just say it’s people in different countries… But you’re [interviewer] sitting here, we’re both sitting here, are we internationally collaborating? Yes, but you could do your PhD here, you could be a professor here… what’s behind it is the universalization of education, in particular of universities (PI 1).

Particularly among scholars in different countries, collaboration leads to more influential, often-cited research ( Katz and Hicks 1997 ; Fortunato et al. 2018 ). This is a key argument for further globalizing the scientific enterprise and recognizing the brain circulation and intercultural teamwork that facilitates recognition and impact across scientific communities ( Sugimoto et al. 2017 ; Wagner and Jonkers 2017 ). For these team members, the benefits of IRC were clear: in-depth global trend analysis and comparison of different national case studies would not have been possible without the knowledge and methodological expertise of collaborators from different countries, at various career stages, and with diverse know-how. The team members learned from each other about historical contexts and the scope of longitudinal trends, broadening their knowledge about higher education and science systems worldwide.

Important meanings associated with IRC were (1) support to cross disciplinary boundaries, and (2) discussions of theoretical and methodological innovation. Reflection of different scientific cultures, strongly related to researcher socialization—in their disciplines, in particular methodologies, and in contrasting cultural contexts—is necessary to engage in dialogue.

‘Learning from each other’s experiences and competencies; it’s impossible to understand a foreign system just by reading articles about it’ (PhD 1).

This example shows the significance of and mutual dependence of researchers to broaden their (comparative) knowledge and expertise. Researchers from several countries collaborating impacts team communication. Diverse understandings of hierarchies and dealing with colleagues from different status groups and cultures had important consequences. For example, ‘…different norms how team members talk to each other’ and ‘no classic boss and student relationship, but in ‘our culture’ in [Asian country] they listen to the senior scholar. No equal conversations’ (PhD 2). Furthermore, different conceptions of theoretical approaches and expertise in data coding and interpretation were among the challenges the team faced.

In addition to general reasons motivating collaboration ( Beaver 2001 , 2013 ; Sonnenwald 2007 ), team members identified numerous specific motivations: learning new methods; research topic relevance; pressure to acquire third-party funding; time to do multidisciplinary work; understanding other higher education and science systems; friendship; and the potential to advance theoretical thinking and methodological expertise. As one PhD student reported:

‘I really enjoy the time with my team because some scholars share their skills’ ; ‘I decided to participate based on these two incentives: I mean, the first is that the topic is relevant to my research… and the second is it may be interesting to work in another country’ ; ‘the topic could fit into my future career, I decided to join’ (PhD 2).

Another stated that ‘after the seminar, [PI 1] asked me to write a proposal with him’ (PhD 1).

Two additional motivations evident in the interviews were the pressure to acquire research grants and third-party funding: money (laughter)’ (PI 1). Available time to participate was essential:‘ I had heard about [the project] and the international collaboration stuff and on his team of grad students I was the only one who was doing higher education research who had time’ (PhD 1).

Further motivations included learning about other higher education and science systems. A shared history among team members promoted their wish to join forces in the project. This confirms Melkers and Kiopa’s (2010 : 391, 408) finding that growing interest in IRC also reflects the personal desire to work together and to access new and diverse resources and knowledge not available at home.

The team’s multidisciplinarity and expertise in multiple methods advanced thinking and facilitated development of new approaches, including the unique database construction. Thus, this case corroborates diverse benefits and motivations of IRC mentioned in the research literature.

Next, we address challenges faced by the team members. International and multidisciplinary projects require considerable organization and structured management of tasks (work packages). This was experienced as a major challenge.

‘Asian people always like to work overtime. But I know [PI 1] would never do that’ (PhD 2).

Working styles represent aspects of the scientific culture, cultural background, career stage, and individual personality. Cultural, organizational, and team expectations may not always be in harmony. Indeed, for some team members, it was challenging to adapt to different social situations and ways of discussing research problems across status groups. Yet experiences in different subteams helped them to overcome fears and to open up, reflecting the influence of global scientific norms.

Not only do different communication styles hinder or enhance collaboration, the geographical location of researchers across time zones and on other continents demanded flexible organization to ensure steady work progress. The distribution of labor needed to be continuously (re)negotiated to achieve the milestones and complete work packages that often relied on other sub-teams. Team members did not explicitly discuss these topics in advance, implicitly assuming that the others would understand their responsibilities to deliver on time–– ‘We never discussed it’ (PhD 1). This manifests the implicitness of norms as well as non-rational qualities of much collaborative work. More regular communication among team members about tasks and specific goals and needs of individual team members, but also about culturally variant workstyles, could have been optimized. Open communications and support by team leaders even after funding ended were essential for this IRC’s long-term success. Culturally diverse subteams with members working outside their countries of origin were responsible for a range of interlocking tasks, requiring individual members to manage different expectations—organizational and interpersonal—to meet the goals set forth in a field new to many. For those writing national case studies on their home country, collaboration proceeded more easily than for those analyzing contexts foreign to them or comparatively.

Over time, more frequent, often bilateral, exchanges within and across the subteams led to better solutions than larger, general discussions with the entire team. Furthermore, while multidisciplinary teams may facilitate innovative ideas and develop new methodological approaches, the lack of shared disciplinary grounding posed challenges. As one doctoral student noted, ‘I have never taken a real sociology course’ (PhD 1), which resulted in delays due to the necessary (and gradual) embedding of findings within the project’s theoretical approach. This comment emphasizes that recruitment processes must take into account the constellation of researchers assembled and project tasks.

As key challenges to successful collaboration, multiple members mentioned time constraints, insurmountable disciplinary differences, and diverse theoretical and methodological strengths and weaknesses. For example, ‘I need to teach them how to do STATA’’ or ‘… scholars from different backgrounds […] have their own interests. I think that is very unique’ (PhD 2). Contrasting norms and discussion cultures, communication styles, and handling of hierarchies and status differences were identified as additional challenges. Furthermore, taken-for-grantedness and the reflection of changing task distribution and subteam membership were mentioned as difficult to negotiate. By contrast, facilitators included ‘ Not making the project too tight; being generous with people; flexibility; I tried to be mellow about it; principle: everybody can use the data, you just have to communicate about it; everybody can publish their own things’ (PI 1). This last example from our interviews shows that flexibility and resilience are important skills team leaders should bring. It is important to keep the overall project goals in mind, but IRCs must also provide room to evolve and to develop new ideas, especially given varying tasks and learning processes within the team and across subteams.

Surveying team members at different career stages and in diverse higher education systems worldwide eight years after project begin, we found a range of benefits, motivations, and challenges ( Table 1 ). Among the many benefits, team members mentioned learning about other higher education and science systems and conducting global research. Learning from and helping each other was closely related to the distribution of labor across subteams that enabled results beyond what any individual or regional team could have accomplished alone. Beyond broadening knowledge, the considerable benefits deriving from the project, a perhaps surprising result is the social significance of team members’ friendships, the reinforcement of existing relationships, and networking. Thus, this social dimension should not be marginalized in future analyses of research collaboration. Further motivations to participate included the relevance of the research topic, career advancement opportunities, and––associated with the clear benefits of such international, multidisciplinary teams—the learning of new theoretical approaches and methods. Individual work does not provide similarly diverse opportunities to learn.

Simultaneously with numerous benefits and strong motivations to collaborate, the team members also reflected on more and less foundational challenges to the project as it evolved from a short-term funded project to a less formal, long-term global collaboration supported solely by intrinsic motivation to learn, to advance the common research agenda, and to maintain friendly social relations. Unsurprisingly for a truly global project with considerable empirical ambition, the organization and structured management of work packages and tasks was challenging, despite the dedicated project management and continuous usage of information technology. In fact, more challenging than actual work organization were contrasting expectations and norms relating to culture and specific organizational contexts. Obviously, individual, disciplinary, and career stage differences affected what researchers needed—and this changed over time as the younger scholars matured, completed their dissertations, and embarked on new projects, some directly building upon the project’s medium-term achievements.

Critically noted, along with different modes of working, were contrasting styles of communication and differing language skills that inhibited free exchange of information. Beyond these more individual challenges, the distribution of labor and the time constraints due to the limited duration of project funding delayed or limited the IRC’s output. Finally, while diverse theoretical and methodological backgrounds reflected team strengths and weaknesses, these also posed challenges for optimal collaboration, especially due to lack of sufficient opportunities for dialogue across considerable spatial distance.

These findings confirm the diversity and complexity of benefits, motivations, and challenges of IRC; of cultural, organizational, and individual characteristics; and of informal and formal collaboration processes leading to scientific contributions, such as coauthored publications. In team science and beyond, these topics require further attention in science, policymaking, and project-based practice. Cultural and social dynamics of collaborative research in multidisciplinary and international teams remain insufficiently investigated. We next reflect on the autoethnographic approach taken and reflect on implications for future research.

The benefits, motivations, and challenges of international collaborative research were analyzed to understand diverse subjective perspectives on the dynamics relating to such collaboration in a specific globe-spanning team. We reviewed research on IRCs on the team level, embedding therein our empirical material, based on autoethnographic interviews and a retrospective survey with the project’s researchers and managers. The case study provides diverse perspectives of members in an international, multidisciplinary team in the sociology of science. Our findings confirmed previous findings on IRCs, but also provided novel insights relating to IRC team dynamics.

For example, the significance of and mutual dependence of researchers to broaden their knowledge and expertise is an essential element of successful research collaborations. Using autoethnography, we uncovered implicit norms and non-rational qualities of collaborative work. This result emphasizes the need for more regular personal communications among team members about the contents of their work, but also about their individual goals, unique contributions, and (career development) needs. The creation of an open communication environment by team leaders is crucial, especially in projects with multilingual members (see Wöhlert 2020 ). Careful recruitment of team members reflecting project goals and approaches is necessary, questioning assumptions that recruitment should be objective or ignore existing personal relationships, as a crucial source of trust. Cultural and career stage issues should be explicitly addressed by team leaders, who attend to evolving task distribution and provide room to develop new ideas and learn to practice critique within hierarchies. Such findings suggest further research focus on IRC team dynamics.

While the presented findings derive from one case study and thus cannot be generalized, the results of this autoethnography highlight specific dimensions of IRCs in the social sciences—and confirm previous findings. Using autoethnographic methods to analyze developments over a decade, we presented insights into cultural differences and intercultural communication challenges, but also into myriad benefits and motivations of collaborating across boundaries, both spatial and social. Open questions for future research include the assessment of relevant dimensions of culture in IRCs—such as national, organizational, or epistemic—as well as discussion of the diversity of cultures within multidisciplinary and intercultural teams and its influence on IRC. The above outlined methodological critiques of autoethnography, such as lack of self-criticism and subjectivity notwithstanding, this approach acknowledges and uncovers often hidden but equally important drivers of research, namely interpersonal connections and curiosity, which are difficult to observe applying other methods, such as bibliometrics that emphasizes collaboration’s most visible outputs.

Further implications for future research include the investigation of team-level dynamics of IRCs and the specific needs of researchers at different career stages. The utilization of individual team members’ strengths and how these can be applied in team building and achieving project goals is another important strand of research. Most studies concentrate on the benefits of IRCs, discounting the challenges. Yet holistic perspectives are needed for realistic planning and durable success in (larger) collaborations that pay off (much) later than official project duration, for the individual researchers, for their organizations, and for global science. The social and networking dimensions should not be underestimated in motivating such research, which may be considered risky, as trust is a key to the sharing of ideas that lead to discoveries. The chosen mixed-methods approach combined analysis of coauthored publications and interpretative analysis of autoethnographic interviews and surveys with various team members (at PI, doctoral, postdoctoral, and project manager levels).

In contrast to the presented retrospectively-designed case study and based on the above findings, for future IRCs, we recommend implementation of accompanying team-oriented autoethnographic research throughout the project—and following researchers’ scientific careers longitudinally—to monitor and reflect on researchers’ dynamic roles within such complex project arrangements and less formal collaboration networks as their careers develop. This approach would have been beneficial for an in-depth analysis and interpretation of the presented results as well as to capture important nuances and informal processes that contribute to the development of social and intellectual capital on the team level in IRCs (see Melkers and Kiopa 2010 : 404).

While there is some variability in the duration of funded projects, the typical 2- or 3-year timeframe is often insufficient to complete empirical data-gathering or the in-depth (comparative) analysis needed for either in-depth understanding or policy recommendations. For complex international projects, teamwork is challenging; thus, necessary trust—including support and friendship—is crucial, especially beyond the official project duration, to complete publications and design follow-up projects; particularly within new settings and constellations of researchers. More explicit reflection of cultural backgrounds and language competencies as well as theoretical and methodological knowledge would facilitate teams’ overcoming key challenges, yet this is often not explicitly made a key criterion during peer review, even though such preparation and processes are essential for long-term project success.

Complex projects, and those in particular disciplines utilizing rare infrastructure, often exhibit collaboration imperatives. Comparative and global higher education and science research are hardly possible without the in-depth contextual knowledge provided by researchers from different places. Team leadership and planning—related to the division of labor and communication, work styles, and cultural and disciplinary backgrounds—demand more attention from scholars and policymakers alike. For the project members, spatial mobility was essential to achieve project goals, yet the burden was unequally distributed. The COVID-19 global pandemic has led to the broad questioning of the effects of spatial distance on IRCs as communication technologies develop even further. More than ever in highly competitive academic labor markets, explicit project planning is crucial. The key motivations and benefits of IRCs are the advancement of scientific careers via opportunities to learn new theories, develop methodological skills, and expand contextual knowledge. Building international, intergenerational networks provides the explicit collaboration opportunities necessary to ensure that the benefits outweigh the challenges of international collaborative research that, in many fields, is increasingly the norm.

We thank David P. Baker and our other SPHERE team members who contributed to our international research collaboration and to this case study. For encouragement, advice, and comments on earlier drafts, we thank Sarah-Rebecca Kienast, Anna Kosmützky, Diego Kozlowski, Marcelo Marques, Romy Wöhlert, Mike Zapp, and the anonymous reviewers. We dedicate this article to the memory of Robert D. Reisz (1964–2020), a convivial and dedicated team member and Dean of the Faculty of Political Science, Philosophy and Communication Sciences, West University of Timisoara, Romania, who passed away unexpectedly and far too young.

We acknowledge the Qatar National Research Fund, a member of Qatar Foundation, for co-funding this research (NPRP Grant No. 5-1021-5-159). The findings herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.

Conflict of interest statement . The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

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Original research article, international research experiences in the development of minority scientists.

• 1 School of Education, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, United States
• 2 College of Science Office of Diversity and Inclusion, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, United States
• 3 Department of Chemistry, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, United States

Undergraduate research and international experiences are often described as high-impact educational practices beneficial for undergraduate student success and for supporting the development of science identity and intercultural competencies. While several studies have investigated the impact of undergraduate research on students from minoritized groups, fewer studies have focused on their engagement in global experiences, and fewer still have explored their engagement in international research experiences. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Science Identity, Social Cognitive Career Theory, and the Intercultural Competence Model, this present study explores the benefits of participating in an international research experience for minority undergraduate scientists. Using a qualitative case study methodology, we examined the evolution of students’ science identity, research competencies, and intercultural competence after engaging in a three-month international research opportunity in France and Belgium. We found that after participating in international research, minority undergraduate scientists had: 1) Increased confidence in their science identity and abilities; 2) Gained and strengthened skills necessary to be a successful researcher, 3) Recognized the influence of international exposure on their growth personally and professionally, 4) Expressed how monumental this research opportunity is for all minority students to experience. Our findings suggest substantial benefits from an international research experience on the development of minority undergraduate scientists.

Introduction

Throughout the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce in the United States, there continues to be a disparity in the participation of underrepresented minorities collectively ( National Science Foundation, 2019 ). White and Asian Americans have representation within the science and engineering (SandE) workforce at rates higher than their representation in the U.S. population. Conversely, African Americans, Latino/a Americans, Native Americans, Alaskan Natives, and Pacific Islanders have much less representation within the S&E workforce than their representation in the U.S. population ( Khan, 2020 ). This disparity in representation is often described as under-representation, and groups that are underrepresented as underrepresented minority or minoritized groups (URM) ( Khan, 2020 ). Given the continued underrepresentation of these groups in the STEM workforce, i.e., 33% of the population vs. 13% of the STEM workforce ( Figure 1 ), policymakers and educational leaders have focused on diverse approaches to address the cultivation of talent across all of our nation’s citizenry.

FIGURE 1 . Comparison of the Racial and Ethnic demographics of United States STEM Workforce and the U.S. Population.

High-Impact Practices That Support Student Success: Undergraduate Research and International Experiences

Within the higher education landscape, leaders have advocated for and adopted several practices that research has shown to be effective for improving student success. Often described as “high-impact practices,” these efforts encompass first-year seminars and experiences, common intellectual experiences, learning communities, writing-intensive courses, collaborative assignments and projects, undergraduate research, diversity/global learning, ePortfolios, service and community-based learning, internships, and capstone courses and projects ( Kuh, 2008 ; Kuh et al., 2010 ).

Within the STEM disciplines at the undergraduate level, hands-on learning experiences through undergraduate research, communication or writing-intensive efforts, and internships have shown remarkable efficacy in promoting retention and success ( Brownell and Swaner, 2010 ; DeLauder and Hollowell, 2012 ; Sanchez, 2012 ; Daniels et al., 2016 ; Haegar and Fresquez, 2016 ; National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine (NASEM), 2016 ). As a high-impact educational practice for student retention and engagement, undergraduate research provides students with in-depth training beyond the classroom ( Kuh, 2008 ). Specifically, engaging in undergraduate research has been proven to develop a student's self-efficacy, identity, and competencies as a researcher while exposing them to potential career pathways and graduate studies not previously considered (Egan et al., 2013; Pender et al., 2010 ; Russell, Hancock & Mccullough, 2007). For students from groups historically underrepresented in STEM, undergraduate research opportunities can particularly prove beneficial in developing their identity, confidence, and sense of belonging in STEM despite the lack of representation ( Bangera and Brownell, 2014 ; Carlone and Johnson, 2007 ; O’Donnell et al., 2015 ). Consequently, several studies have shown how URMs are impacted by engaged learning through undergraduate research and similar experiential learning with significantly positive effects ( Wilson et al., 2012 ; Daniels et al., 2016 ; Fakayode et al., 2016 ; Haegar and Fresquez, 2016 ; Crawford et al., 2018 ; Davidson et al., 2018 ; Fakayode et al., 2018 ; Wilson-Kennedy et al., 2019 ).

International or global experiences, another high-impact practice, have reported several positive impacts on student success ( Dwyer and Peters, 2004 ; DeGraaf et al., 2013 ; Engel, 2017 ). One such result is the increase in student engagement and persistence in their academic programs. For example, Camesano et al. (2016) discussed the value and importance of intentional incorporation of international experiences for Ph.D. students in Biomedical Engineering to enhance their experiences. Specifically, the program’s goal was to offer students “a firsthand perspective on research and translation in a global context so that they are uniquely positioned to become successful leaders in an increasingly international market” ( p . 3). Students in this program shared how their growth personally and professionally resulted from participating in international experiences. While this program provided funding and resources for international exposure, not all students are afforded these opportunities built into their curriculum. Notably, many minority students never get the chance to travel abroad as a component of their academic studies. For example, minoritized groups who are underrepresented in STEM are also underrepresented in U.S. Study Abroad experiences ( Figure 2 ), an indicator of domestic URM engagement in global experiences outside of the U.S. (Institute on International Education (IIE) and (U.S. Department of State’s Bureau on Educational and Cultural Affairs, 2020). These groups have historically missed out on the types of experiences that advance intercultural competencies and leadership development.

FIGURE 2 . Comparison of the Racial and Ethnic demographics of undergraduate students in U.S. Higher Education and those who have participated in U.S. Study Abroad.

Beyond having low participation by minority groups, international experiences have also been concentrated in non-STEM disciplines. As an example, in 2000, natural science and engineering majors (life and physical sciences, engineering, agriculture, and health) comprised only 16.6% of the share of individuals participating in U.S. Study Abroad comparable to the Arts and Humanities, Languages, Business, and Entrepreneurial Leadership, and Social Sciences comprised almost 70% of global experiences through U.S. Study Abroad. Consequently, for many years, international experiences for undergraduates have been under-utilized in the natural sciences and engineering disciplines, with very few students majoring in these fields having the opportunity to engage in even short-term immersive international experiences, much less any longer-term experiences. Notably, as the number of students participating in global experiences has grown, from 154,000 students in 2000 to 341,000 in 2017, so has the share of STEM students (Institute on International Education (IIE) and (U.S. Department of State’s Bureau on Educational and Cultural Affairs, 2020). Nevertheless, we note that because of very rigid curricula, many STEM undergraduate programs do not provide the flexibility needed for a semester-long global experience.

Other norms in the STEM disciplines also limit access to global experiences. Arguably, the prominence of the U.S. STEM education and research enterprise has been a strong rationale for concentrating the academic and professional training of our citizenry within itself. However, the increased globalization of the S&E workforce and enterprises has called into question this practice. Higher education leaders and others have sought to expand opportunities for undergraduates in STEM disciplines to engage in more global experiences that complement their technical research skills to include intercultural competencies needed for future leadership in the global S&E enterprise and economy.

International Undergraduate Research Experiences

As higher education leaders and policymakers have grappled with strategies to increase STEM student access to and engagement in global experiences, one strategy that has gained traction is to combine global with undergraduate research. Several leaders have hypothesized that combining or layering high-impact practices may have potentially additive effects on student outcomes. Some studies have illustrated how layering high-impact practices result in positive outcomes for students ( Finley and McNair, 2013 ). Accordingly, some faculty and academic leaders have posited that combining undergraduate research with global experiences delivered within an internship format could be an intriguing approach for preparing future leaders in STEM and supporting individuals for global STEM leadership ( Duran et al., 2018 ).

Global undergraduate research experiences have the potential to be transformative for students with access to them. Within Higher Education and the STEM workforce, senior professionals actively engage in international research for collaboration and advancing innovation across borders within their respective STEM fields ( Owens, 2018 ). However, few students are able to participate in international research during their undergraduate education. The significant financial commitment of such experiences and flexibility in the academic major are contributoring factors to access. To catalyze STEM student access and training in global experinces, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has taken a targeted approach by dedicating substantial funding to supporting the engagement of undergraduates in international research experiences. With this expansion of research offerings, undergraduate students are afforded a unique opportunity to engage in scholarly research pursuits and collaborations worldwide and broaden their perspectives of other countries and cultures. Moreover, international research experiences can significantly advance the professional, research, and technical skills of undergraduate researchers while exposing them to the world around them.

While extensive studies have investigated undergraduate research’s impact on student development and retention, fewer studies have explored how these experiences in international research settings impact student learning and development ( Green et al., 2008 ; McElmurry et al., 2003). Noting the limited exposure of STEM undergraduates to international experiences, URM in these disciplines are even more underrepresented than their peers in having global experiences. As we seek to understand how international research experiences impact those with access to these, it is imperative to include the impact of international undergraduate research on students from minoritized groups. Few studies have focused on URM engagement in global experiences, and fewer still have explored their engagement in international research experiences.

With this context in mind, this research study aims to explore the development of minority students' science abilities and confidence after participating in an international research experience. This study also explores how international research experiences developed participants’ intercultural competence and awareness of global research and collaboration. This study has three guiding research questions:

 1) How are international research experiences contributing to the educational experience of minority STEM undergraduates?

 2) How do participants describe their growth in intercultural competence after living and working at an international research site?

 3) How does minority students’ participation in undergraduate international research programs support their actualization of being a scientist?

Conceptual Framework

Fundamentally, this empirical study considers how two intersecting high-impact practices, i.e., undergraduate research and global experiences, impact URM STEM students and their actualization of becoming STEM professionals. Noting academic and professional training are critical components of a student’s intent to pursue a career in a STEM career field, this research study is grounded in Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) and incorporates Science Identity (SI) and Intercultural Competence Model (ICM) theoretical frameworks. As such, our study presents a conceptual model integrating these frameworks to promote the development of undergraduates as Global Scientists ( Figure 3 ). This model will investigate minority students’ perceptions of the impact of international research experiences on the ideation of becoming a scientist, research confidence, and intercultural awareness. We hypothesize that these factors are essential to URMs actualizing goals of a STEM career.

FIGURE 3 . A Conceptual Model Integrating Social Cognitive Career Theory, Science Identity, and Intercultural Competencies and Awareness to promote the development of undergraduates at Global Scientists.

Social Cognitive Career Theory forms the foundation of our conceptual framework. Developed by Lent et al. (1994), SCCT posits that individuals approach career development in three interrelated aspects: 1) self-efficacy, 2) outcomes, and 3) personal goals. Thus, individuals who believe or have confidence in their abilities to reach a favorable outcome are likely to pursue opportunities to achieve their goals. Consequently, SCCT illustrates the impact of affirmational growth opportunities. As students meet with challenges (or goals) that they achieve, they develop confidence (self-efficacy) in their ability to do well ( via outcomes) in future challenges (goals). Even if each outcome is not ideal, if the students are learning and adapting through the process, they can develop confidence in their abilities to achieve their goals. Notably, the model considers the impact of one’s identity on their educational and career development process.

By adapting the SCCT framework for understanding STEM career development, Byars-Winston et al. (2016) introduced the Modified model of SCCT incorporating Science Identity theory to offer a scientific approach to understand the development of academic and career goals for underrepresented minority groups in STEM. Previous research studies have indicated that the success in one’s research experiences and future research careers is significantly predicated on their research related self-efficacy ( Hurtado et al., 2009 ; Chemers et al., 2011 ; Byars-Winston, 2015 ).

Central to the modified SCCT model are the elements of Science Identity ( Carlone and Johnson, 2007 ), which describes the three interrelated factors that comprise a student’s science identity: competence (ascertaining and understanding scientific knowledge), performance (demonstration of scientific knowledge to an audience), and recognition (acknowledgment as a scientist by self and others). For underrepresented minorities in STEM, science identity is a significant factor in developing their academic and career goals ( Carlone and Johnson, 2007 ; Byars-Winston et al., 2016 ). Simply put, minority students must have the knowledge (know-how) to be able to perform, perceive themselves as scientists, and have confidence that others perceive them as scientists to attain success within their desired STEM careers.

Our conceptual model is also informed by Deardorff’s process model of Intercultural Competence ( Deardorff, 2006 ; Deardorff, 2009 ). While the application of this framework is concentrated on short-term cultural immersion experiences, studies have reported notable success in the development of intercultural competence and global engagement among participants in an intentional cultural experience ( Salisbury et al., 2013 ; Stebleton et al., 2013 ; Murphy et al., 2014 ). For context, the foundation of this model are five corresponding elements to cultivate growth in intercultural competence: attitudes (respect, openness, curiosity, and discovery), knowledge (cultural self-awareness and deep cultural knowledge), skills (listening, observing, interpreting, and relating), internal outcomes (adaptability, flexibility, and empathy), and external outcomes (effective and appropriate communication and behavior in an intercultural situation). As noted, intercultural competence development is an on-going process throughout one’s life. Thus, each participant’s understanding and development in this area varies at different points of the process. Consequently, our study focused on the internal and external outcomes of our participants in the laboratory and in society. Also, we explored how their orientation in an intercultural research setting heightened their awareness and understanding of science and research on a global scale.

To account for the layered effects of undergraduate research and international experiences, our conceptual framework posits an interplay of the three spheres, 1) Research Confidence, 2) Research and Intercultural Competencies, and 3) Global Research Awareness, as the foundation of minorities development in the total scheme of global scientist development. We theorize that the integration of these three spheres coupled with one’s self-efficacy and outcome expectations is supported by their learning experiences. As such, these elements are essential components in developing an undergraduate’s scientific interests, goals, and actions. Moreover, their participation in such experiences leads to actualization of becoming or being a scientist, career selection, post-undergraduate pursuits, and global research awareness.

To explore the research questions for this study, a qualitative research design was employed to allow for an in-depth, rich exploration of the unique experiences of the participants. Noting the small numbers of minority students engaging in international research experiences, a qualitative study can provide an empirical research approach to deepen our understanding of this critical population and their lived experience within and beyond their engagement in international research as an undergraduate. A single case study approach was employed to gain a comprehensive understanding of complex issues, topics, or problems within their real-world context (Merriam and Tisdell, 2015 ; Stake 1995 ; Yin, 2017 ). As prescribed by ( Yin 2014 ; Yin 2017 ), case study research explores a real-life, bounded system (case) through multiple forms of data. For this study, the bounded case explored the experiences of undergraduate science researchers who participated in the France-Belgium International Research Experience for Undergraduates (iREU); most of the undergraduate research participants are minority students recruited through the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (LSAMP) Program ( National Science Foundation, 2020 ). Because Louisiana State University is the home site for this international research program, IRB approval (IRBAM-20-058801) was granted from this institution to conduct research.

As mentioned, the focus of this research study was the iREU program hosted in France and Belgium. For each research experience, the student researcher identified a researcher at the international site with similar research interests and availability to mentor them during their program tenure. None of the participants had a relationship with their research mentor before the start of their program. Another notable characteristic of the research setting is the language differences in the professional and social environments. In the research lab, the standard language is English which did not pose any challenges as all of the students were native English speakers. However, the students did encounter language barriers in the social settings as the primary language is French.

Participants

The general population of interest for the study was science majors who participated in the France-Belgium iREU program during their undergraduate academic careers. Given this iREU program’s selective nature, we employed a convenience sampling method for participation in this study. Thus, participation in this study was open to all former iREU participants. Using the iREU program contact list, the former iREU participants were contacted via email to garner their interest and complete an initial demographic survey. By design with intentionality, a high number of these iREU participants were recruited from LSAMP programs in U.S. Colleges and Universities. From the initial survey, the participants were contacted via email to confirm their interest and schedule a virtual interview. All participants of this study participated in at least one summer in the international research program prior to Summer 2020 and were interviewed for this study in the latter months of 2020. The study's participants included eight 8) students. The participants included five 5) women and three 3) men. All of the participants were active LSAMP members at the time of their participation in the iREU. The majority of the participants identified as a member of a racial or ethnic minority; one participant identified as White. All of the participants engaged in STEM-related extracurricular activities, including undergraduate research prior to the iREU. Six of the participants were enrolled in graduate programs at the time of the interview. The remaining two participants were in the process of applying for graduate programs; one participant was employed as a post-baccalaureate research associate, and the other participant was a graduating senior. Each of the participants provided their own pseudonyms, which ensured their identity remained confidential ( Table 1 ); these pseudonyms will be used in the discussion of study findings.

TABLE 1 . Participants’ profiles.

Data Collection and Analysis

As prescribed by the case study approach, we collected multiple forms of data, inclusive of documents and interviews ( Stake, 1995 ; Yin, 2017 ). The primary mode of data collection was one-on-one semi-structured interviews that lasted approximately 30 min to 1 h. All of the interviews were conducted virtually using the Zoom platform and were recorded. The interview protocol included questions about the selection of their undergraduate degree path, current career and education path, iREU program experience, perspective on global research, and a reflection of their growth in research abilities and intercultural competence. The interview protocol utilized can be found in the Supplementary Material . The research team also analyzed the iREU program’s grant, iREU year-end reports, promotional materials, and the LSAMP-NSF website to gain a better understanding of the organization’s mission and context.

For the data analysis, each interview audio was transcribed verbatim using Rev transcription services. Once transcribed, each transcript was read thoroughly to gain an understanding of each participant in the study ( Yin, 2017 ). Next, each transcript was uploaded in Dedoose qualitative coding software. Initially, each transcript was open-coded producing subcategories to develop a preliminary codebook. Each transcript underwent several rounds of axial coding, and connections were made between the subcategories to establish the major codes ( Strauss and Corbin, 1998 ). Throughout the analysis, multiple data sources were actively examined to develop an in-depth understanding of each case individually in relation to the research questions ( Yin 2014 ; Yin 2017 ). The final codebook consisted of 16 major categories. Once the codebook was finalized, the thematic analysis process began by categorizing codes by research questions. Next, emerging ideas were developed using the codebook and excerpts. The emerging ideas process interprets the data by using thoughts verbatim from participants or paraphrasing the comments from participants. Once completed, the emerging ideas were grouped by relationships to determine the final themes of the research study. Each step of the data analysis was documented individually to ensure trustworthiness. Throughout the data analysis process, there were several strategies of trustworthiness employed ( Lincoln and Guba, 1985 ). The researchers employed member checking and peer-debriefing throughout the coding process to make sure the data was trustworthy. Once the study findings were completed, participants were asked to review the findings to ensure the trustworthiness of the results ( Miles and Huberman, 1994 ).

Positionality Statement

The research team included two faculty members and one doctoral candidate, whose research interests and professional responsibilities focus on Science and Undergraduate Research and has various experiences with the undergraduate science opportunities and the LSAMP program. The first author is a doctoral candidate and graduate researcher for the College of Science at a PWI. With a science educational background, her research agenda focuses on the experiences of historically underrepresented students in science programs. Her goal is to advocate for equitable academic opportunities for the retention and success of these student populations through her research. The corresponding author is a research faculty member in chemical education and an administrator within the College of Science at a PWI. As a leader on almost $30 million in extramural support from NSF, NIH, USDoEd, and philanthropic agencies, she has designed and implemented over 20 education projects, which have employed mentoring models to create and test development structures that cultivate self-efficacy and agency, particularly for groups historically underrepresented in STEM. Her research centers on studies of the persistence of individuals from all backgrounds in STEM higher education and careers, with a primary focus on faculty and student recruitment, retention, and success. The third author is a professor in the Department of Chemistry at a PWI for 22 years. In addition to his research program in polymer chemistry, he is currently the Principal Investigator for the NSF-funded International Research Experiences for Undergraduates that has sponsored over 80 students in a mentored research program in France and Belgium over the last nine years.

The data analysis revealed four salient themes that emerged across the eight participants. We found that after participating in international research, minority undergraduate scientists: 1) Increased confidence in their science identity, knowledge, and abilities; 2) Gained and strengthen skills necessary to be a successful researcher, 3) Recognized the influence of international exposure on their growth personally and professionally, and 4) Expressed how monumental this research opportunity is for all minority students to experience.

Theme 1: Increased Confidence in Their Science Identity, Knowledge, and Abilities

Throughout the interviews, participants shared how this international research experience helped them validate their sense of belonging and actualize their future in STEM. All participants were asked to rank their science confidence and competencies on a 10-point scale as a researcher before the iREU. The responses ranged from three to eight, with most of the participants citing their lack of confidence and competencies as the reason. Specifically prior to the iREU, Taylor shared:

I will be 100% honest with you. I put off that I’m confident because in my specific major, there were eight of us, and I was the only woman, and the rest are White men. Then, the overall major has 32 of us, and I think three of us are women, and the other two were White. A lot of them were involved in research, and I looked down at myself very much as being part of the lower end of the spectrum. So, I ranked myself very low. Not only in my research, but I think just overall in my academic field. I believed that I can’t be anything that special, but I tried to put off that confident front of I know it, but at least I’m embracing it.

Like Taylor, many of the participants struggled with their confidence and identity as a researcher. Upon reflection of the iREU experience, all participants were asked to rank their science confidence and abilities again on a 10-point scale as a researcher after the iREU. The responses ranged from six to ten, with most participants describing considerable growth in their confidence and competencies. After reflecting on her iREU experience in France, Rosa shared, “I would say now a 10. I feel more confident that no matter where I go, I’ll be able to get the hang of it. Now, I know that even with the language barrier and the different culture, I can make it.” The other participants shared similar sentiments of confidence and assurance in their science identity and competencies.

Additionally, most participants shared how this iREU experience affirmed and validated their sense of belonging and confirmed their pathway in STEM. Natasha passionately shared:

I think France really just taught me it’s okay to love what you love. I look at all these other people that love what they love and just seeing them speak at seminars. We had like weekly seminars, and I had to present at once. It was just like, wow, here I am. A black girl from the States, you know … I’ve had people tell me that you bring your full self, and frankly, I’m like, who else am I supposed to be? Like the white doctors? I’m not white. I’m black. I mean, I have personality, and I’m in STEM, you know. We exist. So I'm not about putting myself in a box. France taught me, be yourself.

Like Natasha, most of the participants returned home from the iREU affirmed in their sense of belonging and also with direction for their research interests and post-undergraduate pursuits. James shared, “I saw this as a pretty good long-term job prospect. This is research I find interesting, and this is research I want to do. It also prepares me for a potential future in industry because energy storage is not going away anytime soon.”

Lastly, participants expressed how the positive feedback from their faculty mentors and research advisors bolstered their confidence and science identity after participating in the iREU. Whether through verbal affirmations or an increase in autonomy in the lab, all participants shared positive accounts of their faculty mentors and research advisors’ response to their growth after participating in the iREU. Specifically, Jacob shared:

It’s reaffirming as well … I think they’re even more blown away because I talked to my professor in France, and we recently published a JACS Publication. I told him, and he was like “I can’t even imagine publishing for JACS, and you’re already publishing there already,” which is crazy. It’s just being able to share those experiences with them. They definitely treat me as a colleague, basically, like someone who actually knows the research that they’re talking about.

Theme 2: Gained and Strengthened Skills Necessary to Be a Successful Researcher

Given the immersive nature of this research experience, all of the participants described substantial improvement in their research, technical and professional skills. Both Jacob, James, and John shared how their technical skills developed with conducting large-scale experiments. Specifically, John shared:

One thing I learned was to work with large-scale reactions. I did reactions at my home institution in the milligram scales. It was very small. In France, I had to work with reactions that require 10 mg or 10 g of this … I gained a lot of confidence in working in the glove box for anaerobic reactions. It gave me a lot of confidence in working in that kind of environment.

Not only did participants gain new skills, but some also shared how they developed protocols and taught other researchers in their lab. Natasha recounted her experience teaching her lab mates how to perform a bacteria culture for the first time. She enthusiastically explained:

And I was like, “Whoa. Girl, you’re so capable. Look at you”. I taught them how do the bacteria culture. They had not conducted one before in that lab. I helped them order the strains, learn how to do the culturing, and use the materials. I taught the whole protocol for conducting the experiment.

In addition to in-lab skills development, most participants shared how their professional skills, such as oral and written presentation of their research, improved. Specifically, Jacob shared

I think that was one of the major things that opened my eyes on what does it mean to be a scientist. It’s not just having the confidence to step into the lab. It’s really having that follow through and being able to write about something to unknown audience. You are writing about your research, and you don’t know who’s going to be the reviewer. You don’t know if someone’s going to be an expert in the field, or if they’re going to be tangentially related to it. I definitely learned that science has a lot more to do with writing than I had originally thought … That’s when I understood the skill sets of a scientist. It’s not just lab and understanding the science. It’s really having this academic voice. Can you convince people that you know what you know? … I had to also present poster presentations, but it was really giving talks and group meetings, where I learned more appropriate ways to present your work. It’s something I never really had too much of that experience before.

Like Jacob, several of the participants shared how their communication skills as a researcher strengthened to be able to discuss their research with a wide variety of audiences. James shared, “I think it was the general science communication, I got a lot more comfortable with it. I got a lot more comfortable with just talking about the work I was doing, but in a more casual format”.

Among their skills development, all of the participants spoke to the development of their work-life balance adopted from their experience with this specific iREU. Specifically, Rosa shared:

I am accustomed to Latino-Hispanic culture, and White people as well … For me, here in the U.S. it's like no holidays, you have to work mentality. Over in France, it's like, we don’t have to come on weekends, or you don’t have to stay after five or six. I was not accustomed used to that. I was accustomed to working all day, every week. In France, they taught me that balance. It also showed me that if you focus really on what you need to do, you can be really proficient. You don't need to stay all day long in the lab to get the data that you need to get really good results.

As participants reflected on the work ethic and culture in France and Belgium, Emily summed it up perfectly: “I work to live. I don’t work to work or live to work”. In contrast to their fast-paced research experiences in the United States, all of the participants shared how their experience in the France-Belgium iREU encouraged them to foster a healthy work-life balance for their STEM careers. For Natasha, she shared, “I think what’s helped me for grad school now is learning that work-life balance. In college, I feel like with STEM majors, we get caught up in getting work done, grades, everything. But in France, And I tell you, well, the whole E.U. cares about your health and your family.

Theme 3: Recognized the Influence of International Exposure on Their Growth Personally and Professionally

For many of the participants, this international research experience broadened their understanding and awareness of research collaborator relationships across countries. Participants remarked how imperative it is to have international research collaboration in the advancement of STEM to solve world issues. Specifically, Mary shared:

It gives you a broader worldview. It’s easy to get stuck in your research lab. You do know that other people are doing the same thing that you’re doing, not literally but metaphorically in a lab, all over the country, all over the world. However, to physically go to a different lab in a different country, it really drives the point home. Given this recent pandemic, that’s one thing that keeps harking back to my mind. People all over the globe are working on these vaccines. People from all different walks of life, all different educational levels are coming together to work on something. I think that’s the beautiful thing about Chemistry.

Similar to Mary, Emily shared how international collaborative research expanded her perspective of science and enlightened her to the necessity for diverse backgrounds and perspectives in science. She explained:

Science involves a lot of people, and everyone needs everyone. Everyone has a part to play, and your background plays a part. I feel like bringing a lot of people from a lot of different countries, you have different perspectives. You have different backgrounds and ways of thinking of new questions. I definitely feel like collaboration and working in different labs in different countries definitely expands how we do science in general.

Not only did their perspective on global research and international collaboration evolve, but several of the participants shared how they have been able to establish their own research collaboration teams. Specifically, Taylor shared, “I’m in the process of working to publish a paper with some of my collaborators from France … I think that really put it into perspective for me when I went abroad that as a scientist I can not only just contribute to the immediate field, but to the larger field, and different ways that could I do that”. Similarly, Natasha’s research mentor encouraged her to develop international collaborations during her time in France. She shared

He was like, “We are not publishing enough internationally, with co-authors from different countries. Yeah, we’re good at collaborating in the U.S. but we could improve international collaborations.” And I think that’s something I took from the experience. We have all these resources. I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel because someone’s done something or part of what you want to do somewhere. Figure it out, email them, get a conversation going”.

In addition to their growth professionally, participants discussed how engaging with individuals from different countries and cultures expanded their personal views on various topics. James recounted his experience discussing politics with colleagues during the U.S. 2016 election. Specifically, he shared:

While I was there, we had the 2016 primary election and then the 2016 general election. I got exposed to that from a very outside perspective. It was really interesting seeing how different the culture there was around just discussing politics. It was a very comfortable topic to chat about. The thing that I found really refreshing was that the culture around that was that it was okay to talk about things and have different opinions, in a way that it’s not in the U.S.

Similar to James, Jacob reflected on his conversations discussing the similarities and differences in race relations in U.S. and France. Specifically, he shared, “In America, of course, a lot of people understand what it means to have these minority programs or what affirmative action looks like, or a lot of these terminologies are thrown around that a lot of Americans understand. But people in France, they had no idea what I was talking about”.

Theme 4: Expressed How Monumental This Experience is for all Minority Students to Partake in

After reflecting on this international research experience, all of the participants resoundingly expressed how this opportunity affirmed the trajectory of their lives as scientists. As Taylor reflected on the iREU experience, she expressed the gravity of this opportunity in hindsight. She shared, “I didn't realize it either at the time, the gravity of the opportunity that we were being given. I don’t think I realized it until I went home … this is not an everyday thing, and this is something so out of left field that so many students don’t get the opportunity to do it. I think I would have maybe appreciated it more in the beginning to understand that”. Similar to Taylor, several participants shared how grateful they were for the opportunity. James summed up their sentiments perfectly, “It definitely changed my path forward. It really helped me to define what I want to do and where I'm at now. I absolutely would not be here right now if I hadn’t done that program. I’m really, really grateful for that”.

In addition to their gratitude for this international research opportunity, participants expressed how the LSAMP program has been integral in their science success. Taylor shared, “It’s not that you need the help, it’s that these people want to help you because they see something in you that you’re capable of doing it.” Similar to Taylor, Rosa shared how LSAMP provides an all-encompassing support system for those who participate. Specifically, she said, “I think it's a complete package because here, the people from LSAMP really supports you, not only at the professional level, but also, at the personal level … no matter the situation, you know they have your back, because there’s a constant personal communication all the time”.

Given the significance of this iREU on their overall development as scientists, all of the participants exclaimed how monumental this opportunity would be for all minority students to experience. Natasha passionately shared, “I’m very grateful for this experience. I will brag about France to the mountaintops. People would probably get annoyed by it, but I want to tell it so that little girls can know that they can go to France, too, and do research”. Similar to Natasha, Jacob enthusiastically expressed “that this experience is the linchpin that says, “You’re not bound here. You can succeed outside, you can succeed in any environment, basically. I think it’s really just that experience I took from there. I left France a more confident person in terms of just all aspects of life. I think that's really what that IREU trip means to me”.

Previous studies on undergraduate research generally focused only on U.S.-based research experiences for all science students. Conversely, little is known about the benefits of international research experiences on the science development of minority students. Thus, our study focused on exploring the development of science identity and competencies in minority undergraduate scientists after participating in an international research experience. The three research questions in this study sought to illuminate the perceived benefits of iREUs through our eight participants' experiences. Although each participant had a highly individualized research experience, there were similar mutual benefits gained from their participation in the iREU.

Firstly, our findings answered the first research question by presenting detailed insights on the value of international research to minority STEM undergraduates’ educational experience. Aligned with prior literature on undergraduate research, we too found that our participants experienced substantial development in their research confidence and competencies. While each participant’s individual research experience was unique, most of them attributed the increase in autonomy, responsibility, and exposure to new techniques for their growth in confidence and competencies. Aligned with our conceptual framework, our findings corroborate the substantial contribution of iREUs to our participant’s research self-efficacy and science identity development. Thus, our participants spoke extensively about their affirmed sense of belonging and direction for their post-undergraduate endeavors and STEM careers. At the time of their interview, six of the participants were enrolled in graduate programs and actively conducting research. The remaining two participants were in the application process to their desired STEM graduate program. Therefore, we concur that international research experiences can contribute substantially to the research self-efficacy, confidence, and competencies development of undergraduate students.

Secondly, unlike previous studies on undergraduate research, our research study explored the benefits of research at an international site for U.S. students for a minimum of three 3) months. Most of the previous literature on international exposure focuses on short-immersion experiences, like study abroad, for students. Thus, an experience of this length and magnitude presents increased opportunities for developing intercultural competence and awareness in participants. Our findings answered the second research question by highlighting the numerous opportunities for participants to exchange ideas and perspectives with individuals from diverse backgrounds personally and professionally. Aligned with the development process of Intercultural Competence, this finding affirms that this long-term immersion research experience is a unique opportunity to engage students in the on-going intercultural competence development process in various facets of life. The students we interviewed shared that a significant benefit of the international research experience was the opportunity to learn from individuals from diverse backgrounds and to develop relationships with research collaborators across the world.

In addition to the development of science identity, self-efficacy, and competencies, our findings answered the third research question through the summation of our participants’ stories, specifically how they perceived this experience as crucial in their actualization of becoming a scientist. Although all of the participants engaged in previous research experiences in the U.S. many of them stated that the ability to conduct research independently and collaboratively with researchers from across the world was unique to their iREU experience and validated their science identity. Several of the participants recounted specific instances in which they came to see themselves as a scientist. For most participants, one such example was the positive interactions and feedback from research advisors and mentors in the U.S. and France. Our findings illustrated how the iREU developed our participants’ competence, performance, and recognition through the lens of Science Identity, showing that the competencies, confidence, and self-efficacy developed in an international research experience reinforced their identity as a scientist. Moreover, their actualization as a scientist is seen through their commitment to encouraging and supporting others to pursue their desired STEM careers. Our findings suggest the importance of peers sharing their experiences to promote retention and persistence in STEM fields.

With a general understanding of research in the United States, participants were exposed to science and research conducted through the lens of another culture. As a result, they recognized the value and importance of international research collaboration with researchers worldwide for the advancement of their respective STEM fields. For many of the participants, this international research experience was their first time viewing themselves as contributing members of their STEM field on a global scale. Certainly, their prior research experiences were impactful on their development as scientists, but several of the participants indicated that the independence gained in the lab through their IRE gave them a different level of confidence in their abilities. In sum, our findings illuminate the interplay of each sphere of development supported the participants’ foundation of their global scientist development.

Implications for Policy and Practice

Participants noted the importance of participating in an iREU to their overall development as scientists, specifically highlighting how the financial support was critical to their international experience coming to fruition. One student mentioned the financial commitment might be a deterrent for some students with dire financial situations. It is vital to consider how to provide iREU opportunities to STEM students with challenging financial situations.

This study also has important implications for STEM faculty and institutions. Based on our participants’ accounts, their iREU experience proves to be a worthy investment for advancing their careers and contributions to their respective STEM fields. With the National Science Foundation’s continued support, more STEM faculty should consider developing more iREU program opportunities across various STEM disciplines. It is valuable for colleges and universities to integrate international research opportunities within academic curriculums as unique learning experiences that can cultivate students’ science identity and goals while boosting their appeal for the job market after graduation.

While our study focused on the international research experience, it is relevant to note that all participants were actively involved in the LSAMP program. Several of the students shared how their participation in LSAMP exposed them to many beneficial opportunities like iREUs. However, one student shared that the benefits and magnitude of international research experiences could be better explained from the program. As the LSAMP program continues to expose students to iREUs, it is exceedingly critical to detail the benefits of participating in international research experiences for students to grasp the magnitude of this opportunity.

Future Research and Conclusion

While we could not explore their nuanced experience in this paper, two women in the study shared instances where they felt challenged based on their gender. Also, several participants mentioned the lack of representation of women advisors in their experiences. Therefore, future research will explore the experiences of women in STEM participating in international research. For example, a similar research study could examine the experiences of women in STEM fields traditionally dominated by men. The opportunity to explore their experiences could provide insights into how they combat gendered stereotypes regarding women in STEM in an international setting.

The current study brings to light the substantial benefits of international research experiences on the science identity, confidence, and competencies of minority students pursuing STEM careers. Although the findings are not representative of all iREU programs, our study adds significant insights to this literature area. For our participants, we find that this experience was a life-changing opportunity that has broadened their understanding of research on a global scale and affirmed their stance on their capability within their STEM fields. Future research in this area could track the progress of the iREU participants over a period of time. A longitudinal study of participants could illuminate the long-term benefits of an iREU to its participants’ career trajectory.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusion of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the LSU Institutional Review Board (IRBAM-20-058801). The participants provided their verbal informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contribution

ZW-K and RD, equally conceptualized the research study with insights from DS. RD conducted the research study and serves as first author of the article. She, along with ZW-K, contributed to the organization of the manuscript. All authors contributed to writing sections of the manuscript and editing of the article. All authors have read and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Awards (#1560390), (#1263336), (#1826824), and (#1826738).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge Randolph (Randy) S. Duran for his leadership of international research experiences and mentorship of others in developing these learning experiences for students and colleagues. We also thank colleagues such as Emmanuel Gras who supported students while abroad.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2021.674673/full#supplementary-material

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Keywords: international research, science identity, intercultural competence and awareness, global experiences, minority scientists, underrepresented minorities, social cognitive career theory, high-impact educational practices

Citation: Davis RD, Wilson-Kennedy ZS and Spivak D (2021) International Research Experiences in the Development of Minority Scientists. Front. Educ. 6:674673. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2021.674673

Received: 01 March 2021; Accepted: 28 June 2021; Published: 08 July 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Davis, Wilson-Kennedy and Spivak. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Zakiya S. Wilson-Kennedy, [email protected]

This article is part of the Research Topic

New Developments in Pathways Towards Diversity and Inclusion in STEM: A United States Perspective

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International research opportunities.

EXAMPLES OF INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES Below is a brief sample of international research opportunities and programs. This list is meant to illustrate the kinds of options that may be available, but it is just a place to begin your search and to provide you with ideas for types of programs:

American Academy In Rome & the School of Classical Studies Research Fellowships : Supports advanced undergraduates to undertake research relevant to the Academy and School of Classical Studies.

The CERN Summer Student Program  - Geneva, Switzerland Students selected for the program will spend from the summer working with active research groups at CERN, one of the world’s premier international laboratories.

Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)  - Switzerland The Summer Research Program in Life Sciences and Technology at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), offers an intensive research training opportunity for undergraduate students interested in research careers in life sciences.

École Polytechnique, The Internship Program for International Students  - France Gives undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to carry out a 3 to 6-month internship in laboratories from Ecole Polytechnique.

EuroScholars  - Research at Nine Research Universities in Europe Opportunity for advanced undergraduates from US and Canadian universities to conduct research at one of nine major research universities in Europe.

Excavations at Tel Dor in Israel   - Tel Dor, Israel Students are instructed in modern archeological technique and become valued members of an international archeological team.

Fulbright US Student Program (Research)  - Various, World-wide The Fulbright is a nationally prestigious opportunity for graduating College students and alum to pursue international research of their own design in countries around the world. Current students and alum must apply through the College process with the support of the CCSA. 

The ISTernship Summer Program - Vienna, Austria Summer research opportunity for students interested in basic research in the fields of biology, computer science, data science, mathematics, physics, neuroscience and interdisciplinary areas.

Ku Leuven Internships  - Leuven, Belgium This internship allows undergraduate and masters students to conduct scientific research in an international setting. 

Multidisciplinary International Research Training Program  - Various Locations The program provides support for undergraduate and graduate students to do health-related population-based research and training in developing countries.

NanoJapan: Summer Nanotechnology Research Internship Program  - Japan The NanoJapan program will select up to twelve (12) first and second-year undergraduate engineering or physics students who will be placed in a Japanese research lab.

National Science Foundation International Research Experience for Students Program  - Brazil The purpose of the University of Pittsburgh's IRES program is to create an innovative research experience in sustainable design for a select group of undergraduate engineering students who have high potential to pursue graduate education.

Partnerships for International Research and Education Science and engineering students from all backgrounds (race, ethnicity, citizenship, and gender) who are interested in the enhancement of cyberinfrastructure or in applying cyberinfrastructure to solve society- and industry-driven problems are encouraged to apply.

The Pasteur Foundation Internship Program   - Paris, France The Pasteur Foundation created a summer internship program for American undergraduates who wish to pursue a scientific career and to expose them to an international laboratory experience.

Research Internships in Science and Engineering  - Multiple locations within Germany RISE is a summer internship program for undergraduate students from the United States, Canada and the UK in the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, earth sciences and engineering.

Singapore International Pre-Graduate Award  - Singapore Supports short-term research attachments for international students at A*STAR. A unique opportunity for top overseas students to experience the vibrant scientific environment in A*STAR Research Institutes and Consortia. Students will be able to work with distinguished and world-renowned researchers in A*STAR labs.

SIT Study Abroad   - Multiple Locations Internationally

Smithsonian Tropical Research Insititute - Panama Internships give interns the opportunity to meet and interact with scientists from around the world, gain hands-on experience in their area of academic interest, and delve into Panama’s rich culture.

The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Undergraduate Scholarship Program  - Germany Highly qualified undergraduate students are invited to apply for scholarships funding study, senior thesis research and/or internships in Germany.

The Open School of Ethnography and Anthropology  - Merida and Piste, Mexico Provides on-site, hands-on training in ethnography and anthropology

The Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy (ASTRON) and the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) Summer Research Program  - The Netherlands The Program enables astronomy students (graduate or advanced under-graduate) to spend the summer (10-12 weeks) at the Dwingeloo Observatory, conducting astronomical research under the supervision of ASTRON and JIVE staff members.

ThinkSwiss Research Scholarship Program  - Multiple Locations in Switzerland Supports highly motivated and qualified U.S. undergraduate and graduate students to do research at a public Swiss university or research institute for 2 to 3 months.

Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program at RWTH Aachen University   - Aachen, Germany Aims to provide students with the opportunity to carry out their own research projects under the guidance of experienced RWTH researchers.

International Research

Princeton boasts many centers and research projects specifically focused on international work. These provide opportunities for students, scholars and faculty to conduct international research, learning and teaching both on campus and around the world. Such is the dynamic nature of international research activity that the following list may not be exhaustive. 

International Projects

Academic fellows from Afghanistan, who worked previously in support of U.S. government efforts there, will collaborate with SPIA’s academic community on policy research to help build an inclusive, peaceful, and prosperous Afghanistan that represents all its citizens equally. 

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Princeton professor  C. Jessica E. Metcalf  and postdoctoral researchers  Fidisoa Rasambainarivo  and  Benjamin Rice  will lead this project evaluating the impact of domestic-animal pathogens on the biodiversity of native wildlife in Madagascar and — in light of COVID-19 — the potential consequences for human health. The researchers will focus on the parasite  Toxoplasma gondii  transmitted by domestic cats, which infects warm-blooded animals and can cause severe disease in many species, as well as birth defects in humans. The researchers will collect samples from endangered carnivores within the island’s protected habitats to determine the extent of infection and the impact of  T. gondii  on species’ health. They will build on these data to help design potential control programs to limit initial  T. gondii  infection in housecats for wildlife conservation and human health. At the same time, the researchers will document the diversity of pathogens found in non-human wild and domestic mammals across the island, from within human communities to the interior of protected habitats, compiling data on the transmission modes that drive the proliferation of pathogens in Madagascar’s native carnivores.

In the Brazil LAB, the South American country is taken as a nexus for thinking through pressing issues that affect people in Brazil and globally, and that are salient to both established scholarship and nascent critical work.

Princeton professors  Robert Pringle  and  David Wilcove  will lead an interdisciplinary team of ecologists, economists and social scientists who will collaborate with communities in and around Mozambique’s  Gorongosa National Park  to help promote biodiversity and strengthen local economies, while also optimizing the landscape’s climate resilience and potential for carbon storage. The project builds on  the Pringle Lab ’s extensive work studying Gorongosa’s ecology, and  the Wilcove Team ’s research related to preserving biodiversity, particularly in tropical and agricultural zones. By using Gorongosa as a model, the researchers aim to develop an adaptable framework that can be tailored for coupled human-natural systems throughout Africa and worldwide.

The Global Japan Lab (GJL) promotes and supports research, teaching, and training on contemporary Japan across multiple disciplines. GJL places particular emphasis on questions regarding demographic change, international relations, and environmental uncertainty – and the contexts in which they are experienced. As the oldest population in the world, a key player in international economic and geopolitical systems, and a country dramatically impacted by climate change and natural disasters, Japan is a particularly valuable source of insight. GJL collaborates closely with the  UTokyo Center for Contemporary Japanese Studies (TCJS)  as part of the  Princeton-University of Tokyo Strategic Partnership .

The Global Systemic Risk research community frames its multidisciplinary inquiry from a number of vantage points to better understand the nature of risk, the structure of increasingly fragile systems, and the ability to anticipate and prevent catastrophic consequences.

The Migration Lab is a multidisciplinary research community that brings a wide range of scholarly expertise to bear upon contemporary migration issues. 

This research community investigates opportunities to channel capital flows to countries suffering from weak institutions and, in many cases, the threat or reality of violent conflict. 

Rapid Switch is a cross-disciplinary research community involving political science, other applied social and behavioral science, and economics whose purpose is to expand and deepen an understanding of pathways to decarbonization.

This research community seeks to foster debate and collaboration among a diverse range of scholars over the character and future of global order. 

C. Jessica Metcalf , professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and public affairs, is examining the intersection of food security and disease in Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo. Home to 2 million people and in one of the world’s poorest countries, Antananarivo hosts a flourishing poultry-farming sector, which provides food security and an income stream for many households. Local poultry farms are primarily small-scale and together provide an affordable source of protein with relatively low environmental impacts compared to industrial agriculture. However, these small operations can be devastated by poultry diseases, particularly Newcastle disease (ND), which swiftly spreads between birds and can cause 100 percent mortality in unvaccinated flocks. This project is modeling the spread and distribution of ND in Antananarivo in order to identify ND-infection risk factors, as well as to improve vaccination and prevent outbreaks. Metcalf is working with Princeton students to map farms, trading centers and ND cases across the city. The project’s hypothesis is that birds are most at risk of infection from contact at trading hubs rather than between neighboring farms. The data will be used to explore the cost and benefit of ND vaccination for local poultry farmers.

Internationalists and locals: international research collaboration in a resource-poor system

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• Published: 28 April 2020
• Volume 124 , pages 57–105, ( 2020 )

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• Marek Kwiek   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7953-1063 1  

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The principal distinction drawn in this study is between research “internationalists” and “locals.” The former are scientists involved in international research collaboration while the latter group are not. These two distinct types of scientist compete for academic prestige, research funding, and international recognition. International research collaboration proves to be a powerful stratifying force. As a clearly defined subgroup, internationalists are a different academic species, accounting for 51.4% of Polish scientists; predominantly male and older, they have longer academic experience and higher academic degrees and occupy higher academic positions. Across all academic clusters, internationalists consistently produce more than 90% of internationally co-authored publications, representing 2320% of locals’ productivity for peer-reviewed articles and 1600% for peer-reviewed article equivalents. Internationalists tend to spend less time than locals on teaching-related activities, more time on research, and more time on administrative duties. Based on a large-scale academic survey ( N  = 3704), some new predictors of international research collaboration were identified by multivariate analyses. The findings have global policy implications for resource-poor science systems “playing catch-up” in terms of academic careers, productivity patterns, and research internationalization policies.

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Introduction

The principal distinction drawn here is between research “internationalists” and “locals.” The former are scientists involved in international research collaboration while the latter group are not. These two distinct types compete for academic prestige and professional recognition (Wagner and Leydesdorff 2005 ), research funding (Jeong et al. 2014 ), and international scientific recognition (Merton 1973 ). While locals produce knowledge for “national research markets” and audiences (Ziman 1991 ), internationalists produce knowledge for international (or local and international) markets and audiences. As reward systems operate differently across countries and academic disciplines, seeking international recognition rather than national recognition is reported to be more or less “necessary” (Kyvik and Larsen 1997 : 260), depending on country affiliation and discipline.

Academic discipline, employing institution and type, and national reward structure all influence international research collaboration. However, the decision to internationalize is ultimately personal, and concepts such as “self-organization” (Wagner and Leydesdorff 2005 : 1610; Melin 2000 : 39; Wagner 2018 : 84) and “informal collaboration” beyond formal agreements (Georghiou 1998 : 612) are especially relevant in this regard. Within the global knowledge network, the motivation to internationalize comes from scientists themselves, and “political ties or national prestige do not motivate the alliances of researchers” (Wagner 2018 : viii). Faculty internationalization is reported to be disproportionately shaped by deeply ingrained individual values and predilections (Finkelstein, Walker, and Chen 2013 ), and scientists vary in their tendency to collaborate internationally: “The more elite the scientist, the more likely it is that he or she will be an active member of the global invisible college” (Wagner 2008 : 15)—that is, the more likely they are to collaborate with colleagues in other countries (Kwiek 2016 ).

Previous studies have shown that the share of internationalists among Polish academics is substantially lower than the Western European average, and their role in Polish academic knowledge production is substantially higher (Kwiek 2015a ). In Europe, Poland is among those countries with the lowest share of internationalists. In a recent study of 11 countries, the mean share of internationalists among European scientists employed full-time in the university sector was 63.8% (Kwiek 2018b ); in Poland, internationalists account for just 51.4%. As measured by a proxy of internationally co-authored publications, Poland had the lowest level of research internationalization in the European Union in 2018 (35.8% based on Scopus data). There are many underlying reasons, but in general terms, this relates to the systematic “deinstitutionalization” of Polish universities’ research mission since about 2010, followed by a slow “reinstitutionalization” powered by two waves of higher education reforms in the last decade (for overviews of the Polish higher education and science systems, see Antonowicz 2016 ; Antonowicz et al. 2017 ; Dakowska 2015 ; Urbanek 2018 ; Bieliński and Tomczyńska 2018 ; Ostrowicka and Stankiewicz 2018 ; Wolszczak-Derlacz and Parteka 2010 ). To increase the international visibility of Polish science, current reforms (under “Law 2.0”) include new funding formulas, a revised research assessment exercise (expected in 2021), and the selection in 2019 of ten “research universities” for additional funding in 2020–2026 within a new “national excellence initiative.” In practice, as in all science systems “playing catch-up,” the direction of change is clear: to increase publication in international journals and the number of internationally co-authored publications.

Certain scientists are clearly more internationalized than others, and this distinction permeates Polish research. As more international collaboration tends to mean higher publishing rates (and higher citation rates), internationalization plays an increasingly stratifying role within the academic profession., Increasingly, those who do not collaborate internationally are likely to suffer internationalization accumulative disadvantage in terms of resources and prestige. (The term “accumulative disadvantage” was originally used by Cole and Cole 1973 : 146). Research internationalization divides the academic community, both across institutions (vertical differentiation) and across faculties within institutions (horizontal segmentation), and highly internationalized institutions, faculties, research groups and individual scientists and less internationalized counterparts emerge. For internationalists, the key reference group is the international academic community; in contrast, locals focus predominantly on the national academic community.

The present study addresses the following research questions. What distinguishes research internationalists from research locals? Are internationalists distinctive in terms of who they are, how they work, or what they think about their academic work? In short, are internationalists a different species within the resource-poor Polish higher education system?

Based on a large-scale academic survey ( N  = 3704 returned questionnaires), this study has global implications for academic career and productivity patterns and contributes to a better understanding of “the collaborative era in science” (Wagner 2018 ) by contrasting the prototypical figure of the internationalist with the local research scientist.

The paper is structured as follows. The next section describes the theoretical framework, followed by data and methods. The results section includes an overview of internationalists, patterns of individual research productivity and international collaboration, patterns of individual research productivity by publication type, a bivariate analysis of working time distribution and teaching and research role, and a multivariate analysis. The logistic regression analysis is in two parts; model approach (I) examines predictors of collaboration with international colleagues in research, and model approach (II) looks at how various aspects of internationalization influence research productivity. The paper ends with a summary of the findings, followed by discussion and conclusions.

Theoretical framework

Studying international research collaboration.

Before moving to more specialized literature, let us briefly describe what is often assumed in international collaboration studies. First, impediments to international research collaboration may include macro-level factors (geopolitics, history, language, cultural traditions, country size, country wealth, geographical distance); organizational factors (reputation, resources); and individual factors (predilections, attractiveness as a researcher in terms of possible input and expertise etc.) (Hoekman et al. 2010 ; Luukkonen et al. 1992 ).

Second, international research collaboration is reported to have costs as well as benefits (Katz and Martin 1997 ; Jeong et al. 2014 ). According to Katz and Martin, “With more people and perhaps several institutions involved, greater effort is required to manage the research” ( 1997 : 16). Specifically, transaction costs (Georghiou 1998 ) and coordination costs (Cummings and Kiesler 2007 ) are higher for international research collaboration. In collaborative research, there is a trade-off between increased publication and research funds and the need to minimize transaction costs (Landry and Amara 1998 ). Collaboration involving multiple universities also complicates coordination and may undermine project outcomes (Cummings and Kiesler 2007 ). Furthermore, while research collaboration with highly productive scientists generally increases individual productivity, collaboration with low-productivity scientists is reported to have the opposite effect (Lee and Bozeman 2005 ).

Third, international research collaboration can be viewed as an emergent, self-organizing, networked system, in which the selection of partners and research settings often relies on the researchers themselves. In more spontaneous or bottom-up collaborations, what matters is “the individual interests of researchers seeking resources and reputation” (Wagner and Leydesdorff 2005 : 1616). Most research collaborations begin with face-to-face meetings, especially at conferences (Melin 2000 ). Scientists connect with each other “on a peer-to-peer level, and a process of preferential attachment selects specific individuals into an increasingly elite circle. The process reduces free riders and greatly increases the visibility of parts of the system” (Wagner 2018 : x).

Fourth, according to resource allocation theory, the attentional resources that scientists and their teams can invest in research (commitment and time) are always limited. This theory holds that “the resources allocated to a function will decrease as resources allocated to other functions increase” (Jeong, Choi, and Kim 2014 : 523). Consequently, the decision to engage in research teamwork “is ultimately a resource allocation decision by which members must decide how to best allocate their limited resources” (Porter et al. 2010 : 241), as time is often a more valuable resource than research funding (Katz and Martin 1997 ). Additional demands can reduce the available time and energy for actual research activities (Jeong et al. 2011 ). Collaboration also involves personal decisions based on “trust” and “confidence” (Knorr Cetina 1999 ), as well as “purpose”, involving multiple issues that range from “access to expertise” to “enhancing productivity” (Beaver 2001 : 373).

Fifth, collaboration is largely a matter of social convention among scientists and therefore difficult to define; what constitutes a collaboration varies across levels (individuals, institutions) and changes over time (Katz and Martin 1997 ). Beyond the “sole research” mode, it is important to distinguish clearly between “internal” collaboration (within the same organization), “domestic” collaboration (within the same country), and “international” collaboration (between countries) (Jeong et al. 2011 : 969). In general, research collaboration can be defined as a “system of research activities by several actors related in a functional way and coordinated to attain a research goal corresponding with these actors’ research goals or interests” (Laudel 2002 : 5). In other words, collaboration presupposes a shared research goal, is defined by activities rather than by the actors involved, and refers only to research that includes personal interactions. By this definition, collaboration need not have any publication objective at any point (Sooryamoorthy 2014 ). However, as broader notions of collaboration are not easy to measure, many studies of research collaboration “begin and end with the co-authored publication” (Bozeman and Boardman 2014 : 2–3).

Finally, international research collaboration can be said to have two prerequisites: the researcher’s motivation and their attractiveness (as a researcher) to international colleagues (Kyvik and Larsen 1994 ; Wagner  2008 ). The potential to join international research networks depends on one’s attractiveness as a research partner (Wagner and Leydesdorff 2005 ). In this regard, “Visibility is a basic condition for being potentially interesting to other scientists, but one also has to be attractive in order to be actively sought out by others” (Kyvik and Larsen 1994 : 163). Also availability of resources increases the level of international research collaboration (Kyvik and Larsen 1997 ; Jeong et al. 2014 ). Beyond that, scientists create and sustain the connections that form the global knowledge network largely because they “become resources to others … connections are retained as long as they are of mutual (or potential) interest to participating members” (Wagner 2018 : 62). In short, networks mean (international) collaboration.

International research collaboration and reward structures in science

Gouldner ( 1957 ) distinguished between scientists who are less research-oriented and more loyal to their employing organization ( locals ) and those who are less loyal to their organization and more research-oriented ( cosmopolitans ). These pure types have subsequently been reformulated in both organizational studies and higher education research (Rhoades et al. 2008 ; Smeby and Gornitzka 2008 ). According to Robert K. Merton’s sociology of science ( 1973 : 374), outstanding scientists are more likely to be “cosmopolitans” who are oriented to wider “national and trans-national environments” while “locals” tend to be oriented “primarily to their immediate band of associates” or local peers.

Centering on the concept of “mobility,” the distinction originally referred to organizational roles and to professional identities and norms rather than research internationalization. Gouldner argued that professionals identify with a reference group and refer to it in making judgments about their own performance. Distinguishing immobile and institution-oriented scientists (loyal to inside reference groups) from mobile, cosmopolitan, career-oriented scientists (loyal to outside reference groups), cosmopolitans and locals can be said to differ sharply in their attitude to research, sources of recognition, and academic career trajectories (Wagner and Leydesdorff 2005 ). In their study of Norwegian scientists, Kyvik and Larsen related the local/cosmopolitan opposition to publishing modes rather than to international collaboration: “while locals can be said to have the Norwegian scholarly community as a frame of reference, cosmopolitans take the values and standards of the international scientific community as a comparative frame of reference” ( 1997 : 261).

As incentive and reward systems in European science evolve to become more output-oriented (Kyvik and Aksnes 2015 ; Kwiek 2019 ), individual scientists are under increasing pressure to become internationalists by cooperating and co-publishing internationally. Performance-based funding and awareness of international research-based university rankings mean that scholarly publishing is closely linked to institutional and/or departmental funding, and collaboration is increasing at author, institution, and country levels (Gazni et al. 2012 ). The Mertonian principle of priority of discovery suggests that international research collaboration is driven primarily by reward structures in highly competitive science systems, especially in the hard sciences (Kyvik and Larsen 1997 ). As Wagner and Leydesdorff have argued, “the many individual choices of scientists to collaborate may be motivated by reward structures within science where co-authorships, citations and other forms of professional recognition lead to additional work and reputation in a virtuous circle” (Wagner and Leydesdorff 2005 : 1616).

Massive international research collaboration can be understood as an emergent, self-organizing, networked system, in which partners and research settings are often selected by the researchers themselves (Wagner 2018 ). With changing reward structures and the new opportunities afforded by information and communication technologies, individual scientists increasingly cooperate internationally in what can be described as a process of “preferential attachment,” as certain individuals are admitted to an increasingly elite circle (Wagner 2018 : x). The omnipresence of internationalists changes how science is perceived, and non-collaboration is increasingly rare, even in the traditionally sole-authored humanities. In that context, Poland is an interesting outlier, with the lowest share of internationally co-authored publications in Europe (Kwiek 2020 ; Scopus 2020 ) and one of the lowest shares of scientists reporting international collaboration in Europe.

Survey-based and bibliometric studies

While the two contrasted prototypical figures of internationalists and locals in research were not used in previous research, the vast literature on international collaboration in research was instrumental in developing the hypotheses, using bibliometric and survey-based studies of international collaboration in research. For example, Kwiek ( 2015a ) looked at internationalists and locals in 11 European systems. Rostan et al. ( 2014 ) and Finkelstein and Sethi ( 2014 ) analyzed internationally collaborating and non-collaborating scholars in 19 countries, and Cummings and Finkelstein ( 2012 ) contrasted a minority of “internationalists” with their “insular peers” in the USA. All four studies were based on survey data juxtaposing collaborating and non-collaborating scientists. Two large-scale international comparative studies of the changing academic profession (CAP and EUROAC; see subsection on the dataset below), published successively in the last 10 years provide useful data. In contrast to the present case, most bibliometric studies refer to international research collaboration defined as production of internationally co-authored publications rather than as research conducted with international collaborators. Nevertheless, both survey and bibliometric approaches contributed to the development of our hypotheses, as they are closely linked and examine related phenomena.

International research collaboration and gender

Beyond the numerous studies on general research collaboration and gender, several survey-based studies have focused specifically on the role of gender in international research collaboration. In most cases, the findings indicate that being female is a negative predictor of international research collaboration (Rostan et al. 2014 ; Vabø et al. 2014 ; Kwiek 2018a ). To cite one survey-based global study, “the prototypical academic figure in international research collaboration is a man, in his mid 50s or younger, working as a professor in a field of the natural sciences at a university” (Rostan et al. 2014 : 130).

In their study of gender and international collaboration, Vabø et al. ( 2014 : 191) found that female scientists report lower international research collaboration than males, regardless of the intensity of international collaboration within the regions studied. While male scientists are generally more involved in international research collaboration, female academics tend to be more involved in internationalization at home—for instance, teaching in a foreign language (Vabø et al. 2014 : 202).

Being male significantly increases the odds of involvement in international research collaboration (by 69%) in 11 European countries (see Kwiek 2018a ). In Fox et al. ( 2017 : 1304), women engineers identified funding and finding collaborators as external barriers to internationalization while personal or family concerns were perceived as significantly less important barriers for themselves than for others. Although in the 2000s, the success rate of research grant applications for female scientists in Poland has been lower than for male scientists, recent data indicate that the trend is reversing, especially for younger generations (Siemieńska 2019 ). For an account of how science globalization perpetuates gender inequalities and disadvantages women scientists, see Zippel ( 2017 ). For an account of internationalization (and especially international mobility) as “indirect discrimination” against women scientists, see Ackers ( 2008 ).

Bibliometric research on gender disparity in international collaboration has been conducted in Norway and Italy. The general conclusion was that the propensity to collaborate internationally in research was similar for both male and female scientists (Norway) or higher for male scientists across the whole population but similar for male and female top performers (Italy). Successive studies have addressed the gap in research on gender differences in research collaboration in general, and international research collaboration in particular, by taking the individual scientist as the base unit of analysis for both whole populations and top performers at national level. In the case of all Italian scientists, Abramo et al. ( 2013 ) showed that women scientists are more likely to collaborate domestically both intramurally and extramurally but are less likely to engage in extramural international collaboration. The study methodology avoids distortion by outliers—that is, by cases of highly productive and highly internationalized scientists whose extensive publications distort aggregate index values (Abramo et al. 2013 : 820; similar gender disparities in international research collaboration were shown in a study of 25,000 university professors in Poland in Kwiek and Roszka 2020 ).

In Norway, Aksnes et al. ( 2019 ) used the Cristin bibliographic database (Norwegian Science Index of all peer-reviewed publications) to study gender differences in international collaboration across the four largest universities. Again, the unit of analysis was the individual scientist; counting all individuals equally as single units, regardless of productivity (Aksnes et al. 2019 : 8), limited the effect of the outliers present in all systems. Analyzed by field, academic position and publication productivity, scientific discipline emerged as the most important determinant of international research collaboration while gender differences were not statistically significant. Bibliometric gender-focused analyses indicate no significant gender differences in overall propensity to collaborate among top scientists, which is similar for female and males (Abramo et al. 2019 : 11).

International research collaboration by age, academic generation, and rank

There are few studies of age, academic rank, and international research collaboration because few datasets combine biographical and publication or citation data at the individual level. These combinations can be studied at the level of individual institutions, but large-scale studies at national level depend on dataset mergers (in Italy, see Abramo et al. 2011a ; 2016 ; in Poland, our ongoing work is based on a merged dataset of 100,000 scientists and 400,000 articles from 2009 to 2018) or comprehensive national databases such as Norway’s Cristin. Given the policy challenge posed by the progressive aging of European academic faculty, data-driven studies of national populations of scientists are especially useful. For example, in a major study of all Italian full professors, Abramo et al. ( 2016 : 318) concluded that productivity declines significantly with age. However, professors appointed at a young age were more likely to maintain and increase their productivity than colleagues promoted at a later age. The age/productivity nexus has been widely studied in recent decades (see for example, Stephan and Levin 1992 ), leading to an investment-motivated model of scientific productivity in which scientists become less productive as they age (see Kyvik 1990 ; Kyvik and Olsen 2008 ). However, the age-related productivity of all scientists has only recently been compared to the productivity of top performers. In their bibliometric study of Spanish National Research Council scientists, based on a class-based approach (top, medium, and low performance), Costas et al. ( 2010 ) concluded that the productivity of top- and medium-performing scientists increases or remains stable with age, decreasing for them only among older scientists. In contrast, the productivity of low-performing researchers tends to decrease with age (Costas et al. 2010 : 1578). In a study of age and productivity of Italian National Research Council scientists, Bonaccorsi and Daraio ( 2003 : 75) concluded that productivity declines with age and that the average age of researchers is increasing, with severe policy implications for national science systems.

Theoretically, international research collaboration can be studied by age, academic cohort (or academic generation), and period, so that age effects, cohort effects, and period effects need to be carefully distinguished. However, in practical terms, “except under conditions that hardly ever exist, a definitive separation of age, period, and cohort effects is not just difficult, but impossible” (Glenn 2005 : vii). As this research is cross-sectional (only longitudinal data follow scientists over time), age and cohort (generational) effects are intermingled. Differences shown by age may or may not be age effects because Polish scientists of different ages studied through the survey instrument are members of different cohorts and “may have been shaped by different formative experiences and influences”, with differences between them possibly being cohort effects (Glenn 2005 : 3). All we learn from our research is about male and female scientists of varying ages in the period when our survey was conducted (and the various methods for estimating age, period, and cohort effects are not used in regression analysis in Sect.  4 ). Although clearly “cohort matters” (Stephan 2012 : 175), cohort analysis par excellence cannot be conducted based on the dataset at our disposal. Belonging to a specific historical generation can have an influence on individual productivity (Kwiek 2019 ), and individual opportunities to engage in international collaboration differ by period (Rostan et al. 2014 : 125). Here, “generation” may refer to “biographical generation” (expressed as biological age) or “status generation” (expressed as career stage) (Jung et al. 2014 ). Seniority by age and by career stage tend to overlap in most countries, including Poland, as indicated by an integrated biographical and publication database (created and maintained by the author) of all 100,000 Polish academic scientists. Survey-based cross-generational studies of the academic profession can look beyond productivity by career stage. For example, Jung ( 2014 ) looked at four generations (“fledgling”, “established”, “maturing”, and “patriarch”), and Shin et al. ( 2015 ) referred to three generations (“academic boomers”, “sandwich generation”, and “new generation”).

The opportunities for Polish scientists to collaborate internationally prior to the collapse of Communism in 1989 and after it differed substantially for both younger and older cohorts of scientists in these periods (see Najduchowska and Wnuk-Lipińska 1990 about the 1980s; Wnuk-Lipińska 1996 about the 1990s; and Kwiek 2017 about the 2000s). These scientists’ careers were clearly affected by events occurring at the time their cohorts graduated and beyond, as the Communist and then postcommunist worlds were disintegrating. The international opportunities were restricted by wider politics and a lack of research funding in the 1980s and by a lack of research funding and new, readily available teaching-focused revenue generation by scientists and their institutions in the 1990s and 2000s. Then the opportunities were widely open in the 2010s, with revised research policies powerfully supporting internationalization in research (Kwiek and Szadkowski 2018 ; Antonowicz et al. 2017 ) for all academic cohorts. In other words, in Poland as elsewhere, “success in science depends, in part, on things outside of the control of the individual scientist” (Stephan and Levin 1992 : 4).

There is a simple explanation for senior and older academics’ higher propensity to collaborate internationally. A study of 19 countries found that internationalists have “more power, better networks, and longer experience” (Jung et al. 2014 : 214) and that senior positions entail more resources in terms of “power, prestige, visibility, and scientific standing” (Rostan 2015 : 257). Younger academics may also have less success in collaborating internationally because this is more expensive than national or intra-institutional collaboration, although for the same 19 countries, Rostan et al. ( 2014 : 129) reported that the oldest generation of scientists are an exception to this rule. International research collaboration is becoming increasingly common among younger generations. As one recent study showed, collaboration in Norwegian research universities increased from 58% in 1992 to 66% in 2001, and to 71% in 2013. Not only are younger generations more internationalized, but almost all generations become increasingly involved in international research collaboration as they age (Kyvik and Aksnes 2015 : 1448–1449). As Kwiek’s ( 2019 ) cross-generational European comparison showed, the oldest generations account for the highest share of scientists collaborating with international research partners. In the 11 countries studied, the youngest academic cohort never represented the highest share of internationally collaborating scientists. This is perhaps unsurprising, as international collaboration in research needs time to develop, as well as access to funding (Jeong et al. 2014 ).

Just as some generations become more productive as they age, some generations are more likely to collaborate as they age. This is clearly linked to changing job market conditions over time, as competition for university jobs waxes and wanes. In more competitive times, only young scientists who are more productive and more internationalized from the very beginning are likely to be employed in the university sector. (On the role of time and place in academic careers, see especially Stephan and Levin 1992 ; on the impact of cohort effects, see Stephan 2012 ). Different current generations of scientists were also socialized within “different narratives about higher education’s mission, objectives, and role in society” (Santiago et al. 2015 : 1474). These narratives would differ in their emphasis on productivity and on international collaboration and publishing.

As Kyvik and Aksnes ( 2015 : 1448) clearly demonstrated for scientists who were the youngest age cohort in 1989–1991, some generations excel in international collaboration over time and as they age. As defined by the survey instrument and sample (e-mail addresses of all academics listed in the national database), younger and older Polish academics are a textbook example of this. Career opportunities and academic norms differed significantly for those entering the academic labor force prior to 1989 and for those who came after (Kwiek 2017 ). Generally, international research collaboration in Poland under Communism was heavily restricted. Specifically, research-related international travel was focused on the Warsaw Pact countries. Survey-based studies from the period show that, from a cross-generational perspective, 84% of full professors from the Polish university sector in 1984 traveled for research purposes to socialist countries and 87% traveled to Western European countries in the previous years. The respective rates for assistant professors were about half as high (40% and 39%, respectively; the rate for all academic positions was 59%) (Najduchowska and Wnuk-Lipińska 1990 : 81). About a decade later (in 1993), both types of professors were traveling considerably less often to former socialist countries, and their most frequent destination in research collaboration was Western Europe (Wnuk-Lipińska 1996 : 145). No other studies about the scope of international research collaboration for the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s are available. Polish universities in the early 1990s were highly selective in employing young scientists. However, as the Polish higher education system began to expand (from 0.4 million students in 1989 to 1.95 million students in 2006), its selectivity dropped significantly. Average individual productivity, research orientation, and involvement in international research collaboration diminished. Prevailing academic norms also differ between those entering the profession before and after the reforms of the 2010s (Kwiek and Szadkowski 2018 ).

From about 2010, new entrants to the profession have been considerably more research-oriented compared with their older (but not the oldest) colleagues. The new entrants are also more inclined to publish internationally. Polish scientists in general resisted pressures to publish internationally until the recent wave of reforms in 2018–2019, which scheduled a revised research assessment exercise for 2021 and selected 10 additionally funded research universities for a new excellence initiative (2020–2026). The international collaboration imperative was translated into the rules of research assessment at individual and institutional levels and the rules in the acquisition of competitive research funding from the National Research Council (NCN). In the specific Polish case, the academic survivors from the cohort of young scientists in the mid-1990s are predominantly internationalists today. Even though they had to cope with unprecedented challenges in research internationalization while working in the 1990s and 2000s, with scarce research funding and the general deinstitutionalization of the research mission in Polish universities linked to their overwhelming teaching-focus (Kwiek 2012 ), these scholars are more engaged in international research collaboration than the younger, technology-savvy cohorts (as we show in Section " Internationalists: an overview ").

International research collaboration by academic field

Numerous studies (e.g., Cummings and Finkelstein 2012 : 103; Rostan et al. 2014 : 122–123; Vabø et al. 2014 , Finkelstein and Sethi 2014 ; Aksnes et al. 2019 ) have reported a strong correlation between academic field and patterns of international collaboration. Using a predictive model based on data from 19 countries, Finkelstein and Sethi ( 2014 ) reported that scientists in “hard” fields were 2.3 times more likely to be highly internationalized than those in “soft” fields. As well as discipline, nationality contributes to scientists’ motivation and opportunity to engage in international activities (Finkelstein and Sethi 2014 : 235). Pressure to publish internationally is also higher in hard fields, and an emphasis on publishing through “proper scientific channels” further intensifies international collaboration (Kyvik and Aksnes 2015 ). Scientists in the physical sciences and mathematics cluster are by far the most internationalized across 11 European systems, with 76.2% collaborating internationally, and those in the cluster of professions to be the least internationalized (53.3% or about a half of them (Kwiek 2015a : 347–348). Aside from differences among national and international disciplinary communities, collaboration pressures also differ by department and institution (highest in research-intensive universities and lowest in teaching-focused institutions) (Kwiek 2019 ).

International research collaboration and research productivity

Over the last few decades, the themes of international research collaboration and research productivity have been widely examined in survey-based, interview-based, and bibliometric studies. One significant limitation of survey-based data from the 600 CAP/EUROAC studies is that they cannot determine the relative impact of international collaboration beyond quantifiable gains in productivity because the survey instrument did not incorporate journal names and citations (Rostan et al. 2014 ). In his study of highly productive academics across 11 European systems, Kwiek ( 2016 : 388–393) showed that, among statistically significant individual variables, “internationalization and collaboration” emerges as the single most important predictor of research productivity. More specifically, three variables (“collaborating internationally,” “publishing in a foreign country,” and “research international in scope or orientation”) at least double the odds of becoming a top performer (i.e., in the upper 10% of research productivity).

In the case of Polish top performers in STEM disciplines, international collaboration increases the odds of entering this class by a factor of seven. Along with “publishing abroad,” this emerges as the most important variable in the logistic regression model; both are more powerful predictors than “research orientation” and “time spent on research,” the two traditional predictors of high productivity (Kwiek 2018b : 443). As shown elsewhere, international research collaboration is correlated with a substantially higher number of publications in all 11 countries studied and in all academic clusters (Kwiek 2015a : 350). While the relationship between productivity and collaboration is not necessarily causal, more productive scientists are certainly more internationally visible and therefore potentially more attractive partners for international collaboration. One study of Italian scientists concluded that both research productivity and average quality of output impact positively on international collaboration. Volume of international collaboration is positively correlated with productivity, which in turn impacts intensity of international collaboration and average publication quality (Abramo et al. 2011a : 642).

As to whether more collaborative scholars are more productive, the evidence is mixed, especially when using fractional counting (Abramo et al. 2017), and collaboration rates differ significantly across countries and disciplines (Thelwall and Maflahi 2019 ; Fox et al. 2017 ). In general, more productive scientists tend to collaborate more with international colleagues, and the most productive or top performers are much more internationalized than their lower-performing colleagues (Kwiek 2019 : 23–71). However, while research performance is directly correlated with intensity and propensity for international collaboration, there is no evidence of the reverse (Abramo et al. 2011b ).

International research collaboration, working time, and academic role orientation

As opposed to research productivity, working time distribution and academic role orientation (i.e., teaching or research) have rarely been studied in the context of international research collaboration. In productivity research, high research time investment (and low teaching time investment), high research role orientation (and low teaching role orientation), and research that is international rather than national in scope and character are correlated with high research productivity (Cummings and Finkelstein 2012 : 100–101; Kwiek 2019 : 167–197). Both themes have been widely explored in survey-based studies, which are the only means of examining such academic behaviors and attitudes in detail. However, to the best of our knowledge, no published study to date has compared internationalists and locals in terms of working patterns and role orientation. In 19 countries studied, Finkelstein and Sethi ( 2014 : 253) found that faculty who were primarily teaching-oriented were only half as likely to be internationalists, and that collaborating scientists were primarily research-oriented.

International versus national research collaboration

The link between national and international collaboration is rarely discussed. These two patterns of collaboration differ by career stage, in that junior scientists are more internationally collaborative than their seniors (Shin et al. 2014 : 191). The “collaborating domestically” variable does not feature in logistic regression analyses of high research productivity in any European country other than the United Kingdom (Kwiek 2016 : 392), where it increases the odds of becoming a top research performer by more than a factor of four. It can be assumed that national collaboration decreases as international collaboration increases in what can be termed a “crowding out effect.” Alternatively, scientists who are highly collaborative internationally may also be highly collaborative nationally and institutionally. Bibliometric studies can measure these correlations at the individual level, comparing internationalists and locals by academic field and gender at both institutional and country level, depending on the available data.

International research collaboration: individual versus institutional predictors

Finally, survey-based studies have also explored individual and institutional predictors of high research internationalization and the relationship between various dimensions of internationalization and various productivity types. Using self-declared data on internationalization activities, logistic regression analyses show that, at institutions where individual faculty drive internationalization, academics are more likely to be “internationalists” than those at institutions where international linkages are established by administrators (Finkelstein and Sethi 2014 : 253). In a study of high research performance, individual-level predictors were much stronger than institution-level predictors (Kwiek 2016 : 392). Examples include survey-based logistic regression studies to study international research collaboration using both individual and organizational independent variables (e.g., Rostan et al. 2014 ; Finkelstein and Sethi 2014 ; Cummings and Finkelstein 2012 ). In general, these concluded that individual variables are far more important than organizational variables in predicting international research collaboration.

Research hypotheses

Based on previous survey-based and bibliometric research on international research collaboration, combined with previous research on Polish higher education and research sectors, nine working hypotheses were tested in this study.

H1: Gender hypothesis

Internationalists tend to be male rather than female.

H2: Age and academic seniority hypothesis

Internationalists tend to be older and occupy higher academic positions.

H3: Academic field distribution hypothesis

Internationalists tend to come from hard rather than soft science fields.

H4: Domestic collaboration hypothesis

Internationalists tend to collaborate domestically more often than locals.

H5: Productivity hypothesis

Internationalists are more productive than locals.

H6: Working time distribution hypothesis

On average, internationalists work longer hours and spend more time on research, less time on teaching, and more time on administration.

H7: Academic role orientation hypothesis

Internationalists are more research-oriented than locals.

H8: Individual predictors hypothesis

Individual predictors of being an internationalist are more important than organizational predictors.

H9: Productivity type hypothesis

Dimensions of internationalization differ in their impact on different productivity measures.

Polish higher education: a short profile

Until about 2009, Polish universities remained largely unreformed following fundamental changes in 1989. Core features of the system—relatively non-competitive funding modes, strongly collegial governance, and a complicated multi-level system of academic degrees and careers—remained largely untouched until the early 2010s (for more detail, see Kwiek and Szadkowski 2018 ). Since the 2000s, research output has been assessed, benchmarked, and linked to public funding levels—at the aggregate level in the case of basic academic units and at the individual level for project-based research funding. Research grants are now competition-based, and public subsidies for teaching and research depend on academic unit performance relative to other units. There is quasi-market resource allocation for academic units (and, from October 1, 2019, for academic disciplines within each university), involving competition for a fixed amount of annual funding. Detailed points-based bibliometric assessments of individual academics and academic units linked to a ministerial ranking of academic journals increasingly determine the available financial resources.

Poland is gradually implementing a performance-based research funding system (Kulczycki et al. 2017 ). Funding is linked either directly to prior research outputs (through subsidies allocated to individual academic units rather than to institutions) or indirectly in the form of grant-based competitive funding for academics. The ongoing changes center on competitive project-based funding from the national research council (NCN).

Since 2010, the formula for the distribution of research funding has changed gradually, with institutional “haves” receiving more of the available competitive research funding. In other words, the new funding mechanisms fuel vertical stratification and the gradual emergence of two opposing institutional “families”: those that are strongly or moderately research-oriented and those with no research mission or funding. Additionally, the new Excellence Initiative—Research Universities will provide additional funding (accounting for 10% of total subsidies received in 2018) to 10 major universities and technical universities (selected in October 2019) for the period 2020–2026.

Despite these ongoing changes, the Polish science system remains heavily underfunded in Western European terms. According to Main Science and Technology Indicators (OECD 2019 ), Poland’s Gross Domestic Spending on R&D (GERD) in 2017 as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was the fourth-lowest in the European Union (at 1.03 as compared to 1.97 for EU-28 countries and 2.37 for OECD countries). Poland’s Higher Education Expenditure on R&D (HERD) as a percentage of GDP also remains among the lowest in the European Union. The low levels of public and private investment in R&D are reflected in publication, citation, and international collaboration data for the period 2009–2018 (Scopus 2020 ). The limitations of both Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus datasets are widely discussed in the literature; specifically, the two datasets do not cover publications in Polish, still prevalent in Polish social sciences and humanities. A recent report based on 120,111 articles published in 2013–2016 highlights that only 25.1% of academics in economics, 41.1% in social sciences, and 55.5% in law had any publications in English in this period (Kulczycki 2019 : 26). However, while national datasets include multiple publication formats (which are also used in further analyses), for cross-national comparative purposes about the scope of international collaboration, Scopus is generally very useful.

In 2018, total Polish publication output (all types in Scopus) was about 51,000, with 34,200 articles (5.59% of the total output of 28 European Union member states, increasing by more than a half within a decade, from about 22,000 in 2009). Poland’s share of internationally co-authored articles is the lowest in the EU-28. Although this increased from 29.1% in 2009 to 35.8% in 2018, the EU-28 average was 45.7% in 2018. While the figure almost doubled during this period (from about 6400 to about 12,300), it remained relatively small at just 4.38% of the EU-28 figure (up from 3.93% in 2009). In terms of Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), Poland has struggled to achieve the world average of 1.0, which it reached only in the last 3 years (FWCI 2018: 1.02). On a more positive note, Poland’s average international collaboration impact for 2009–2018 roughly matches the average for EU-13, EU-15, and EU-28 countries. In short, Polish scientists’ publication patterns differ substantially from those in major Western European science systems. This is changing, but slowly. A decade ago, Poland and Romania had the lowest rates of internationally co-authored publications, and this remains the case today.

Analysis of Polish science’s level of internationalization in the period 2009–2018 confirms the almost complete inefficiency of the higher education reforms introduced over the last decade. The structure of publications indexed in the Scopus database has remained almost unchanged for a decade, and although research internationalization is a key element of the recent reforms, growth is extremely slow. Polish science exhibits high levels of national research collaboration (25.4% in 2018), yet the only large European countries where this level is increasing are Poland and Romania. Polish science is also characterized by a high level of intra-institutional collaboration (28.1%)—that is, publications whose authors are affiliated to the same institution. In 2018, this figure exceeded 25% in only three European countries: Poland, Lithuania, and Slovakia (see a comparative analysis of 28 European system in 2009–2018 in Kwiek 2020 ).

In the context of Polish reforms, increasing the intensity of international research collaboration is by far the best way to increase the global visibility of national research. Only scientific collaboration that is intensive, long-term, and consistently subsidised by the state (at both institutional and individual levels) can facilitate the gradual transition of Polish science from the periphery to the center of European research. As part of the 2009–2011 wave of reforms, Poland explored ways of distributing research funding, but the level of public expenditure remained low. As such, Polish science is among Europe’s most resource-poor systems, and the low levels of international research collaboration discussed here are a direct consequence of this low level of public investment.

Researchers cooperate with colleagues from abroad primarily because it pays off scientifically for them. By cooperating and publishing more internationally and less with colleagues from their own institutions, the incentives for international collaboration become stronger than for intra-institutional collaboration. However, the data show that the situation in Poland over the last decade has been exactly the opposite; existing mechanisms (and the available research funding) have promoted intra-institutional collaboration at the expense of international collaboration. Consequently, Poland is joint first in Europe (with Lithuania) in terms of intra-institutional collaboration and co-authorship and last in terms of the international collaboration that is crucial for globalized scientific development.

Data and methods

Defining internationalists.

Internationalists in Polish universities are clearly defined as academic scientists who collaborate in research with their international colleagues. Collaborating with international research colleagues may indicate different levels of international mobility and co-authorship (from intense to none). For present purposes, internationalists are contrasted with locals —academic scientists who do not collaborate with international research colleagues. In the survey, the questions pertaining to international research collaboration were formulated as follows. “How would you characterize your research efforts during this (or the previous) academic year? Do you collaborate with international colleagues?” (Yes/No) (Question D1/4). No explanation or guidance was provided in relation to the terms collaborate, international , or research . “Polish scientists” were defined by their affiliations, following the survey instrument and the sample used, as all scientists listed in the official national registry of scientists employed in Polish higher education institutions from which e-mail addresses were drawn, regardless of their citizenship.

The data were sourced from the European Academic Profession: Responses to Societal Challenges (EUROAC) study, which is a sister project of the global Changing Academic Profession (CAP) study (see Carvalho 2017 for a recent overview of the CAP/EUROAC family). The final dataset, dated June 17 2011, was created by René Kooij and Florian Löwenstein from the International Centre of Higher Education and Research—INCHER-Kassel. The response rate in Poland (11.22%) was similar to those in studies of the academic profession in several countries over the last decade.

Survey respondents marked one of twenty one disciplines (as officially defined by the Central Committee for Academic Degrees and Titles in its act of October 24, 2005). Academics were grouped in eight clusters of academic disciplines, or eight academic fields in the Polish classification—humanities and arts (HUM), social sciences (SOC), physical sciences and mathematics (PHYSMATH), life sciences (LIFE), engineering and technical sciences (ENGITECH), agriculture (AGRI), medical sciences and health-related sciences (MEDHEALTH), and other disciplines (like fine arts)—that best represented the structure of the Polish academic profession. The grouping was determined by the regulation of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of August 11, 2011 on the classification of areas, fields, and disciplines: the eight clusters represent eight major academic fields.

The total number of valid responses (those answering at least 50% of questionnaire items) was 3704; non-responses occurred at both item and unit (person) level, and item non-responses differed significantly. As the final analysis excluded scientists from “other” disciplines, those employed in the postdoctoral position of docent , those who did not answer the question about international collaboration in research, and those whose work contract did not involve research, 2453 observations from seven major discipline clusters were included: 1172 from internationalists (51.4%) and 1107 from locals (48.6%), see Table 1 .

Stratified random sampling was used to ensure that the resulting sample was distributed in the same way as the target population (Hibberts et al. 2012 : 61–62; Bryman 2012 : 192–193). A stratified sampling frame was created, using two criteria: gender and academic position. (The description of sampling, instrument, data collection, and limitations draw on a parallel Scientometrics paper on Polish top performers; Kwiek 2018b : 421–425.) Stratification of the sample mirrored that of the population on the specified criteria and mirrored a simple random sample in all other ways. Random sampling was subsequently used to obtain elements from each stratum. Members of the target population were identified by accessing a national ministerial database of all Polish academic scientists.

At the time of the survey, the target population to which the results were to be generalized included 83,015 scientists employed full-time in the public sector (43.8% female and 56.2% male, including 17,683 full and associate professors (21.3%), 36,616 assistant professors (44.1%), 10,784 assistants (13.0%), and 15,013 senior lecturers and lecturers (18.1%) (GUS 2011 : 308–309). Private sector scientists were excluded because the sector is fully teaching-focused.

The sample of Polish scientists was representative of the target population on the two strata of gender and academic rank and included 45.2% female scientists and 54.8% males; 22.6% full and associate professors, 42.1% assistant professors, 10.9% assistants, and 24.4% senior lecturers and lecturers. There was no sampling bias; no members of the sampling frame had nil or limited chances of inclusion in the sample; and no group of scientists was systematically excluded from the sampling frame (Bryman 2012 : 187). However, as it is impossible to determine to what extent the pool of respondents differed from the pool of non-respondents, there remains a possibility of non-response bias (Stoop 2012: 122), and no subsequent survey was conducted to ask non-responders why they did not participate.

Instrument and data collection

The survey was performed by the National Information Processing Institute (OPI). An invitation to participate in the web-based survey, with individually coded identifier, was sent in June 2010 to 33,000 scientists—that is, all scientists whose e-mail addresses were available—at national level. This narrowed the target population to the sampling frame, with an inevitable coverage error. There was no pre-notification e-mail, and two reminders were sent electronically between June 1, 2010 and July 20, 2010. Full anonymity was assured in the invitation, and reminders were sent only to non-respondents, using the assigned identifiers. Web-based surveys tend to incur a specific non-response bias due to lack of internet access (although this is likely to be smaller for academics, who routinely use both e-mail and internet). The questionnaire was pilot tested by outside parties, who reviewed the format and wording and structure of individual items, in May 2010.

In seeking to contrast research internationalists and locals, there is a trade-off between the advantages of using self-reported survey data and publication numbers as the only measure of research performance and the use of a combination of publications, citations, H-index, and other bibliometric measures. Detailed individual-level data—including data on international research collaboration rather than the international publication co-authorship proxy—depend on the use of a survey instrument.

Methodological strengths and limitations

The analyses are based on self-declared data, provided voluntarily by Polish scientists. The chosen measure of research productivity was the number of peer-reviewed articles (and peer-reviewed article equivalents) published during a three-year reference period. To varying degrees, respondents “may present an untrue picture to the researcher, for example answering what they would like a situation to be rather than what the actual situation is” (Cohen et al. 2011 : 404). Although self-reported publication data are not perfect, they do not seem to entail systematic error (that is, errors are random) or systematic bias (which occurs when errors tend to be in one direction more than another). The survey instrument did not distinguish between different tiers of academic journals and, unfortunately, did not permit study of citation patterns. Journal impact factor and number of author citations were beyond the scope of this survey. As a consequence of data anonymization, individual research productivity could not be linked to individual institutions beyond the six major institutional types and could not be linked to large databases providing citation details (such as Scopus).

To strengthen the robustness of the analyses (see also Kwiek 2018b , 2019 ), a study of articles was supplemented with a study of article equivalents—to be able to include books, until recently massively published in a specific Polish context. Three measures were used in addition to peer-reviewed articles (PRA): peer-reviewed article equivalents (PRAE), internationally co-authored peer-reviewed article equivalents (IC-PRAE), and English language peer-reviewed article equivalents (ENG-PRAE). That is, publication counts were converted into article equivalents. The PRAE measure is calculated as the weighted sum of self-reported articles in books or journals (valued as 1 article equivalent), edited books (valued as 2 article equivalents), and authored books (valued as 5 article equivalents) published over the three-year reference period. This follows the procedure used in Piro et al. ( 2013 : 309), Rørstad and Aksnes ( 2015 : 319), Kyvik and Aksnes (Kyvik and Aksnes 2015 : 1443), Bentley ( 2015 : 870), and Gorelova and Lovakov ( 2016 : 11). In most survey-based studies, 4–6 articles equate to one full monograph. However, importantly, the selection of formula used for calculating article equivalents influences the observed publication patterns (Kyvik and Aksnes 2015 : 1449).

Following Bentley ( 2015 ), a self-reported share of peer-reviewed publications was applied to each observation. The advantage of using the PRAE measure in a cross-disciplinary study is that it captures various publishing outlets, encompassing authored and edited books (which are still a major social sciences and humanities outlet in Poland) as well as articles. The IC-PRAE measure is based on the self-reported share of publications co-authored with international colleagues, and the ENG-PRAE measure is based on the self-reported share of publications published in a foreign language, which is predominantly English (for 87.1% of Polish scientists). While the IC-PRAE measure refer to collaboration type (internationally co-authored publications imply a degree of collaboration), the ENG-PRAE measure refers only to the language of publications, regardless of their type. Consequently, no distinction is made between “national” and “international” publications in this study. The survey therefore asked combined questions about number of scholarly contributions and percentage of peer-reviewed publications, English-language publications, and internationally co-authored publications. It did not ask, however, about the share of single-authored or non-collaborative publications; considering that more than a half of Polish scientists do not publish in Scopus-indexed journals, classical bibliometric databases could not be easily used for estimations of their proportions. Only about 20% of publications by Polish authors are indexed in Web of Science (WoS) or Scopus databases: there are 1,149,304 publications in the Polish Scientific Bibliography (PBN) registered for 2013–2018, of which only 243,522 (21.17%) are indexed in WoS and 271,818 (23.65%) are indexed in Scopus. Consequently, the publication patterns from WoS and Scopus cannot be easily transferred to those of all publications by Polish authors. It is worth a reminder that internationalists are contrasted with locals on the basis of their academic activities of (collaborating or not collaborating in research) rather than their publishing patterns (publishing or not publishing internationally; publishing or not publishing in co-authorship with colleagues affiliated with foreign institutions).

The research productivity analyses reported below convert publication counts into article equivalents for fairer comparison of productivity across academic fields in which publication patterns are dissimilar (Kyvik and Aksnes 2015 ). The PRAE measure was used to facilitate more comprehensive exploration of cross-disciplinary differences in publication patterns between top performers and others; the IC-PRAE and ENG-PRAE measures were used to explore how the two groups differed in terms of internationalization. Article equivalents were applied to multi-disciplinary studies involving major clusters of disciplines rather than to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics clusters alone. Article equivalents have been used in Scientometrics and Journal of Informetrics studies (e.g., Kyvik 1989: 206; Piro et al. 2016 : 945; Bentley 2015 : 870; Rørstad and Aksnes 2015 : 319). The use of PRA and PRAE measures reflects the particularity of the Polish system, which has traditionally supported the production of books across all academic fields.

Other limitations

One of the present study’s limitations is that the survey instrument could not distinguish different nationalities (countries), locations (institutions and departments), intensities (high to low), and modes of contact (e.g., face-to-face/conference/e-mail) in international research collaboration. Instead, international research collaboration as a behavioral concept was measured as a crude Yes or No , and different individual perceptions of internationalization in research were amalgamated and averaged. A second limitation is that Polish scientists could not be compared across institutions—for example, the study does not illuminate differences between scientists from prestigious institutions (especially the flagship institutions, the University of Warsaw and Jagiellonian University; see Kwiek and Szadkowski 2018 ) and those of lower academic standing. A further limitation relates to the structure of the dataset; as no distinction could be drawn between single-author and multiple-author publications only total counts were possible. The same was true of national and international publications, beyond the use of proxies (“internationally co-authored publications” and “publications in English”). Finally, the cross-sectional dataset made it impossible to compare research internationalization across academic generations. Despite these limitations, it was possible to test the working hypotheses and to arrive at valid conclusions.

Research results

Internationalists: an overview.

Frequencies of the selected demographic characteristics of internationalists are listed in Table  2 . Unsurprisingly (in light of existing evidence on gender in international research collaboration) (Ackers 2008 ; Fox et al. 2017 ; Kwiek and Roszka 2020 ; Abramo et al. 2013 ), male scientists are more internationalized than female scientists; a majority of male scientists (56.0%) are internationalists as compared to 45.0% of females. Gender differences are field-sensitive, with a higher percentage of female internationalists in hard academic fields. As the gender difference is statistically significant (which has powerful policy implications in terms of internationalization as a stratifying force in the academic profession), Hypothesis 1 is supported.

H2: Age and seniority hypothesis

Internationalization in research in Poland is an older scientist’s game, increasing with age, academic experience, academic degree, and academic position (Table  2 ). First, internationalization clearly increases with age; internationalists are a minority in the 30–39 age group but a majority in older age brackets. Second, internationalization clearly increases with academic experience; while a minority of scientists with less than 20 years of experience are internationalists, a majority of those with at least 20 years of experience are internationalists, with the highest share in the oldest age group. (Academic experience refers to years of full-time employment in the higher education sector beyond teaching and/or working as a research assistant.) Finally, internationalization increases with academic degree level and academic position; a minority of PhD-only scientists and assistant professors (where a PhD is prerequisite for habilitation and habilitation is prerequisite for professorship) are internationalists as compared to two-thirds of scientists with professorships and those employed as ordinary professors. In this sample, the mean age of internationalists was 47.5 years, and their mean academic experience and institutional experience (i.e., employment by the same institution) were 20.9 years and 18.6 years, respectively.

Polish internationalists therefore align with known patterns (Rostan and Ceravolo 2015 ; Rostan et al. 2014 ; Shin et al. 2014 ); in general, internationalization is lower among younger generations and higher among older generations. Across all age brackets, the highest levels are in the physical sciences and mathematics, and the lowest are in social sciences (Kyvik and Larsen 1997 ; Smeby and Gornitzka 2008 ) (see Fig.  1 ). The distribution of Polish scientists across academic clusters corresponds roughly to their distribution in the higher education system. (The tiny Polish Academy of Science was excluded from this survey.) The share of internationalists increases with academic position across all disciplines, both hard and soft. For PhDs in SOC, AGRICULT and MEDHEALTH, the figure is about one-third as compared to two-thirds in PHYSMATH. For habilitation degree holders, the share is lowest in AGRICULT and SOC and highest in PHYSMATH and LIFE. Finally, in the case of professors, eight or nine out of ten in PHYSMATH, LIFE and MEDHEALT are internationalists as compared to about half in SOC and AGRICULT (see Fig.  2 ). On that basis, Hypothesis 2 is supported.

Internationalists by age group and academic cluster (%)

Internationalists by academic degree and academic cluster (%)

The cluster of soft academic fields comprises HUM and SOC while the cluster of hard academic fields comprises PHYSMATH, LIFE, ENGITECH, AGRICULT, and MEDHEALTH. All OTHER fields were removed from the analysis. Internationalization is highly field-sensitive; internationalists comprise only a third of scientists in social sciences but more than three quarters in physical sciences and mathematics. As they constitute a minority in soft fields and a majority in hard fields (Table  3 ), Hypothesis 3 is supported.

Polish internationalists also collaborate more often domestically—in other words, international collaboration seems not to exclude collaboration with national peers (D1/3: “Do you collaborate with persons at other institutions in your country?”). Only one in five internationalists (20.5%) do not collaborate domestically (Table  4 ). We can only speculate about the reasons for domestic non-collaboration, which may include lack of time for both types of collaboration, lack of funding for domestic collaboration, lower quality of national peers, or limited opportunities to co-publish internationally. Interestingly, only half of locals collaborate domestically—in other words, half of those who do not collaborate internationally also fail to collaborate domestically. This effect is highly differentiated across fields; about two-thirds of locals in humanities and social sciences do not collaborate domestically—in other words, in soft academic disciplines, the “lonely scholar” model prevails (63.3% of locals). The highest share of locals collaborating domestically is in life sciences (71.6%).

For all academic fields (Table  5 ), the percentage of internationalists collaborating domestically is higher than the percentage of locals collaborating domestically. As the results are statistically significant for all fields except social sciences and agriculture, Hypothesis 4 is supported.

Individual research productivity and international collaboration

This hypothesis was tested using the standard measure of number of peer-review articles (PRA) and IC-PRA and ENG-PRA measures to provide a more detailed account. Average research productivity is summarized in Tables  6 , 7 and 8 , comparing locals (left panel) and internationalists (right panel), by productivity type (PRA, IC-PRA, ENG-PRA) and academic cluster. The present study adopts Teodorescu’s ( 2000 : 206) definition of research productivity as the “self-reported number of journal articles and chapters in academic books that the respondent had published in the 3 years prior to the survey.” For instance, in line 1, mean PRA for the three-year reference period is 3.2 for all locals and 4.3 for all internationalists in humanities (HUM) cluster; as only 58.3% of locals and 56.9% of internationalists actually published, the means are 5.4 and 6.5, respectively, with medians of 3.6 and 6.1, respectively. The 95% confidence interval for mean (4.6 articles as a lower bound and 6.2 articles as an upper bound) indicates that the 4.6–6.2 interval covers the number of articles with 95 percent of certainty; similarly internationalists in the humanities produced on average 6.5 articles, with the 5.3–8.5 interval. In the context of 11 European systems studied elsewhere, the average Polish scientist is a low research performer, and their publication outlets are largely national (Kwiek 2016 ).

As shown in Table  7 , international co-authorship of publications is marginal for Polish locals (2.1%) and higher (but still relatively low) for internationalists (13.8%). There is clear cross-disciplinary differentiation among internationalists; for PHYSMATH, the share is almost 50%, and for LIFE and AGRICULT, it is about 40%. At the other end of the spectrum, humanities and social sciences internationalists fall in the 15–20% range. The average for soft academic fields is 15.0% while hard fields average 37.6%.

Finally, as shown in Table  8 , about a third of Polish locals publish in English (36.3%), as compared to 51.7% of those collaborating internationally. Again, the highest shares are reported for PHYSMATH, with six out of ten (locals and internationalists) publishing in English. In general, Polish internationalists are a world apart from locals in terms of publishing patterns. Additionally, internationalists are strongly differentiated by academic discipline and in particular by the soft/hard split. Internationalists produce more publications and more publications with international colleagues, but there are significant disciplinary variations. Among internationalists in the PHYSMATH cluster, almost 70% of publications are internationally co-authored; in MEDHEALTH and LIFE clusters, the figure is about 50% while in the HUM and SOC clusters, it is just above 30%.

Across academic clusters, internationalists (accounting for 51.4% of all scientists) produce more than 90% of internationally co-authored publications (Table  9 ); in PHYSMATH, SOC and LIFE clusters, the share is 97–99.9 percent. This means that scientists in these clusters who collaborate internationally produce almost all internationally co-authored publications—that is, no international collaboration means no internationally co-authored publications. Internationalists are also responsible for 75.0% of all Polish publications in English ENG-PRA. In PHYSMATH and LIFE, they are responsible for more than 80% of publications in English. Locals (about half of the Polish academic profession) produce only a quarter of all publications in English. In other words, non-collaboration is strongly correlated with publishing in Polish only.

Research productivity among Polish scientists is strongly correlated with international research collaboration and is consistently higher than that of Polish scientists who are not involved in international collaboration across all academic clusters and on all measures applied. International publication co-authorship is also strongly correlated with international research collaboration, ranging from 1.2 times higher than for locals (MEDHEALTH) to 5 times higher in the physical sciences and mathematics and social sciences clusters. In contrast, scientists who do not collaborate internationally report a mere 3.2% of their publications as internationally co-authored in hard science fields and no more than 1.9% in soft fields (Table  7 ).

The pattern is consistent for all scientists (internationalist and local) across all academic clusters, both in Poland and across European systems. Among those who do not collaborate internationally, only a marginal percentage of their publications are co-authored with colleagues from other countries. These scientists account for a substantial share of the academic profession across Europe, including 47.5% in the professions, 40.0% in engineering 31.9% in humanities and social sciences, 39.6% in life and medical sciences, and 25.3% in physical sciences and mathematics (based on a sample of 17,211 scientists from 11 systems; Kwiek 2019 : 143).

Individual research productivity by publication type

Individual research productivity can also be examined by publication type beyond peer-reviewed articles (see for example Sooryamoorthy 2014 ). For present purposes, the question was formulated as follows: “How many of the following scholarly contributions have you completed in the past three years?” (Question D4), with separate responses for scholarly books authored or co-authored, scholarly books edited or co-edited, articles published in an academic book or journal, research report/monograph written for a funded project, paper presented at a scholarly conference, and article written for a newspaper or magazine. The next question (D5) was formulated as follows: “What percentage of your publications in the last 3 years were: peer-reviewed” (D5/6); published in a language different from the language of instruction at your current institution (D5/1); or co-authored with colleagues located in other (foreign) countries?” (D5/3). The questionnaire distinguished explicitly between different types of publication; importantly, Polish academic scientists are used to counting different publication types for institutional reporting purposes.

The survey instrument facilitated comparison of productivity among internationalists and locals across a wide array of publication types. In every case, internationalists were found to be more productive than locals to a statistically significant extent ( p  < 0.001). Internationalists are clearly substantially more productive in terms of internationally co-authored publications: for every internationally co-authored article published by locals, internationalists publish 23.2 such articles, and for every internationally co-authored article equivalent, internationalists publish 16 such article equivalents. Internationalists are a world away from locals in terms of international co-authorship and almost three times as productive in terms of publications in English.

On average, internationalists are much more productive in terms of internationally co-authored publications. For every internationally co-authored peer-reviewed article (IC-PRA) published by locals, internationalists publish 23.2 such articles, and for every internationally co-authored peer-reviewed article equivalent (IC-PRAE), internationalists publish 16 such article equivalents. For English language peer-reviewed articles (ENG-PRA), the figure is 2.9, and for article equivalents (i.e., both for articles and all types of books combined (ENG-PRAE)), it is 2.8. In this sense, internationalists are a world away from locals in terms of international co-authorship and almost three times as productive in terms of publications in English (see LOC vs. INT: the last column in Table  10 ). Internationalists are also about 70% more productive in terms of conference papers, and about 50% more productive in terms of peer-reviewed articles (PRA) and peer-reviewed article equivalents (PRAE). Differences in productivity by each publication type (except newspaper articles) were statistically significant. In short, Hypothesis 5 is supported.

Research results: bivariate analysis

Working time distribution: internationalists vs. locals.

This section reports the results of independent two-sample t-testing. (T-tests assess the difference in values for paired observations). In the present case, the dataset captured five dimensions of academic work: teaching, research, service, administration, and other academic activities. The focus here was on differences in mean working hours between internationalists and locals in each academic cluster, based on weekly hours during teaching and non-teaching periods of the academic year. These hours were annualized, assuming that a figure of 60% for the former and 40% for the latter would be a good approximation for the Polish system (60% of working time annually includes teaching; 40% of working time annually does not include teaching).

Differences between the two subpopulations in various categories of working hours (by academic activity) are summarized in Table  11 . The results are based on two-sided tests that assume equal differences in arithmetic means (with significance level α  = 0.05). For each pair with a statistically significantly mean difference from zero, the larger (INT or LOC) is specified. T -tests for equality of two arithmetic means (INT vs. LOC) were performed for each of the five types of academic activity, for each of the seven academic clusters, and for soft clusters combined and hard clusters combined. (All differences were statistically significant).

The mean differential in annualized total weekly working time for internationalists and locals is 4.4 h (see Table  12 ). The picture that emerges here portrays Polish academia as traditional. On average, internationalists spend less time than locals on teaching-related activities and much more time (about + 30%) on research, as well as more time on administrative duties. However, there are substantial cross-disciplinary differentials in total weekly working time distribution, ranging from 5.9 h for humanities to 11.4 h for social sciences.

In other words, as compared to Polish locals in social sciences, Polish internationalists in social sciences spend an average 64 additional full working days in academia per year (i.e., 11.1 h more per week × 46 weeks, divided by 8 h per day). More specifically, they spend an average 9.4 additional hours per week (or 54 additional days) on research. Not surprisingly, internationalists in social sciences report the longest weekly working hours and the second longest research hours (after physical sciences and mathematics). For Polish internationalists, longer working hours seem standard (and especially more research hours). The cross-disciplinary difference is stronger in soft disciplines. In summary, Hypothesis 6 is supported.

Teaching and research role orientation: internationalists vs. locals

The existing literature suggests that research internationalization is correlated with high research orientation (Rostan et al. 2014 ; Shin and Cummings 2010; Teodorescu 2000 ). The Polish system as a whole emerges from this research as entirely traditional. The results of the z test for equality of fractions for the two subpopulations are based on two-sided tests with a significance level of α  = 0.05. Using the Bonferroni correction, the tests were adjusted for all pairwise comparisons within a row for each innermost sub-table. Z tests for the equality of fractions (INT vs. LOC) were performed for each of the four categories of teaching and research orientation. Correspondingly, as before, for each pair with a fraction difference significantly different from zero, the larger category appears in the last column (Table  13 ).

The stronger research role orientation among internationalists is statistically significant, as is the higher teaching role orientation among locals ( p  < 0.001). In other words, internationalists value research more than their local colleagues. A primary interest in teaching virtually excludes Polish scientists from the class of internationalists; the percentage of internationalists who are primarily interested in teaching is 1.1 percent. However, contrary to the existing evidence in relation to teaching-research competition (Fox 1992 ; Ramsden 1994 ; Stephan 2012 ; Stephan and Levin 1992 ), 18.6% of those interested “in both, but leaning towards teaching” were internationalists. More than 80% of internationalists were research-oriented as compared to about 60% of locals. In Poland, research role orientation is a powerful indicator of the internationalist—indeed, it is almost a statistical must—while being teaching-oriented almost precludes membership of this class. On that basis, Hypothesis 7 is supported (although closer examination by academic cluster proved inconclusive).

Research results: multivariate analysis

Model approach (i): predictors of collaboration with international research colleagues.

What are the predictors of being an internationalist? What makes some Polish scientists more likely than others to collaborate with international colleagues? The dependent variable was faculty internationalization in research (“collaborate with international colleagues in research”; D1/4; Yes / No ). An analytical model for studying internationalization in research was developed on the basis of the existing literature, notably Cummings and Finkelstein ( 2012 ), Rostan et al. ( 2014 ), Finkelstein and Sethi ( 2014 ), Finkelstein et al. ( 2013 ), and Abramo et al. ( 2011a ). From forty two selected personal and organizational characteristics, the independent variables were grouped into individual variables (36) and organizational variables (6). Individual variables were further divided into six clusters (Table  14 ).

All categorical variables were dichotomized using a re-coding procedure. Pearson Rho correlation tests were then conducted to identify significantly correlated predictors of the dependent variable. These predictors were entered in a logistic regression model. When multicollinearity was tested using an inverse correlation matrix, no independent variables were found to be strongly correlated with others. Additionally, principal component analysis (PCA) was performed to determine whether any variables could be assigned to homogenous groups by virtue of a high level of correlation. No significant interdependence was found between any of the variables. The model was estimated using a stepwise backward elimination based on the Wald criteria, so only significant variables were included in the model. Iterations stopped at the 32nd step. The predictive power of the model (as measured by Nagelkerke’s R 2 ) was 0.502. The results for the model are presented in Table  15 .

Six individual variables and one organizational variable proved to be statistically significant. Holding full professorship emerged as a powerful determinative predictor of being an internationalist (Exp( B ) = 8.862), substantially increasing the odds of being an internationalist (other predictors being held constant). Defining one’s research as primarily international in scope or orientation was also an important predictor of being an internationalist (based on the definition used here) (Exp( B ) = 4.692), as was individual’s primary influence in establishing international linkages (Exp( B ) = 3.421) and being a hard scientist (Exp( B ) = 3.034). Longer weekly research hours were predictors of being an internationalist: a one-unit increase (i.e., 1 h) increases the odds by about 6.2% on average ( ceteris paribus ) The odds were also increased significantly increased by teaching in a foreign language (Exp( B ) = 2.853) and international publication co-authoring (Exp( B ) = 3.034) (Table  15 ).

Importantly, in the context of previous literature on international research collaboration, statistically insignificant variables included gender, spouse and family, age, as well as attachment to one’s discipline and institution. In previous research in other countries, being female was generally found to be correlated with lower international collaboration (Fox et al. 2017 ; Abramo et al. 2013 ), as was having children at home (Kyvik and Teigen 1996 ; Ackers 2008 ). In Poland, only reaching the academic career pinnacle (full professorship) increases the odds of collaborating internationally in research; neither doctoral degree nor habilitation degree enter the equation. In other words, international research collaboration is strongly correlated with high research achievement (leading to the full professorship title, as research is the only criterion used in the Polish system; the full professorship title as a binary variable is correlated with research productivity understood as the number of peer-reviewed articles published in the reference period). Age is not a statistically significant predictor; full professors rather than merely older scientists tend to be more often engaged in international collaboration (for a quantitative and qualitative generational approach, see Kwiek 2017 ). In summary, Hypothesis 8 is supported.

Model approach (II): How internationalization influences productivity

Finally, a modeling approach was also used to investigate how general variables and variables related to internationalization (in teaching and research) influence various aspects of productivity. As measures of productivity, dependent variables included PRA, PRAE, IC-PRAE, and ENG-PRAE. Productivity-related independent variables included gender, age, institutional type (reference: academy), academic degree (reference: PhD), academic field (reference: HUM). Finally, internationalization-related independent variables included responses to statements about international content in courses, collaboration with international colleagues in research, having international students, teaching any courses abroad or in a foreign language, research being primarily international in scope or orientation, employing in research primarily mother tongue, as well as publishing in a foreign country, in a foreign language, publishing works co-authored with colleagues located in other countries, spending at least 2 years in other countries since the award of first degree, and earning PhD in a foreign country.

Table  16 details the results of regression analysis, with models for each of the four productivity types (PRA, IC-PRA, ENG-PRA and PRAE) (all types: peer-reviewed). For each productivity type, there are three separate models: all scientists (ALL), internationalists (INT), and locals (LOC). In total, then, twelve models (1 through 12 in Table 16 ) were estimated; beta coefficients and significance of parameters are shown for each.

In the first regression model of productivity (dependent variable: PRA) for all scientists (Model 1), the general independent variables significantly associated with productivity were age, habilitation degree, full professorship title, and life sciences; the significant internationalization-related independent variables were publishing in a foreign country, publishing in a foreign language, and international co-authorship. The model explains 41% of the variance ( R 2  = 0.409). In summary, older scientists are likely to produce fewer papers, and all internationalization-related variables increase productivity.

In the second regression model of productivity (PRA) for internationalists (Model 2), the general independent variables significantly associated with productivity were age, habilitation degree, full professorship title; and two internationalization-related independent variables: publishing in a foreign language, and international co-authorship. As in Model 1, there was a powerful negative correlation between age and productivity. The model explains almost 40% of the variance ( R 2  = 0.388). Finally, in the regression model of productivity (PRA) for locals (Model 3), only two independent variables (both internationalization-related) were significant: publishing in a foreign country and publishing in a foreign language ( R 2  = 0.315). In models 4 through 6, IC-PRA was the dependent variable; in Models 7 through 9, the dependent variable was ENG-PRA; and in Models 10 through 12, PRAE was the dependent variable—again with separate models for all scientists, internationalists, and locals.

The analyses reveal some interesting generalizations and several exceptions. Interestingly, gender does not enter the equation in any model for any productivity-related dependent variable. Age as an independent variable is not correlated with productivity for locals in any of the four clusters of regression models, nor for the three types of scientist in the case of article equivalents as dependent variable (Models 10–12). This can be explained by the fact that locals are more attached to traditional (and generally less competitive) publishing outlets of books and edited books. Habilitation degree and professorship are significantly correlated with all scientists and internationalists (rather than with locals), perhaps explaining why international collaboration is strongly correlated with productivity as measured through all its dependent variables (PRA, IC-PRA, ENG-PRA, and PRAE). For locals, the correlation holds only for article equivalents, which means that locals move up the ladder of scientific degrees and titles through traditional outlets (books and edited books) rather than articles. International content or orientation in teaching and teaching international students as (teaching-related) internationalization independent variables are not correlated with productivity. Teaching in a foreign language is negatively correlated with productivity in ENG-PRA and PRAE models. This confirms the traditional teaching/research trade off, or competition rather than mutuality (Fox 1992 ) in Polish academia, or at least supplies the missing link between internationally-oriented teaching and research productivity, in line with previous findings (Kwiek 2015b ). Interestingly, and somehow counter-intuitively, among internationalization-related independent variables, neither long-term stay abroad nor foreign PhD are correlated with productivity, confirming previous findings about mobility, collaboration, and productivity (Ackers 2008 ; Kyvik and Larsen 1997 ; Rostan et al. 2014 ; and Cummings and Finkelstein 2012 ). Ackers ( 2008 : 430–432) suggests a clear distinction to be made between long-term mobility and short stays abroad, with each bringing different added value to research and researchers. Earning PhD abroad as the only academic socialization variable used in the model decreases the odds of international research collaboration in a sample of scientists from 11 European systems (Kwiek 2018a : 19). The specific cases would probably be long-term stays in the USA as the global science hub and PhD earned there rather than anywhere else, more prestigious institutions leading to more “reputational capital” (Ackers 2008 : 421); however, our survey instrument did not allow to distinguish between the countries visited. Our results are in line with findings about Norwegian scientists: long-term professional stays abroad, if not followed up by keeping in touch with foreign colleagues, lead to “virtually no differences in productivity” (Kyvik and Larsen 1997 : 254). Also in a study of scientists from 19 countries, PhD earned abroad was not a predictor of international research collaboration (Rostan et al. 2014 : 128–129); and in the case of the USA, earning PhD outside of the country was not a predictor of international research collaboration either (Cummings and Finkelstein 2012 : 97–101). Only in the case of the IC-PRA model for locals, productivity increases with long-term stay abroad (on average by 0.7 internationally co-authored peer-reviewed article in the reference period of 3 years) and decreases with foreign PhD (on average by 1.5). Hypothesis 9 is therefore supported.

Summary, discussion, and conclusions

The present findings reveal that some scientists are clearly more internationalized than others, and this distinction permeates the Polish academic science community. Internationalization divides the academic community in terms of prestige, recognition, and access to competitive research funding. Research internationalization is a powerful stratifying force, causing both vertical between-institution differentiation and horizontal within-institution segmentation across faculties. In the Polish science system, highly internationalized institutions, faculties, research groups, and individuals are increasingly separate from their local counterparts.

In the present case, nine hypotheses were tested, drawing on a large sample ( N  = 3704 returned questionnaires) of Polish academic scientists across all disciplines. Using survey-based rather than bibliometric data, the research explored a wider than usual range of international collaboration factors, including gender, age, academic seniority, academic field, domestic collaboration, productivity, working time distribution, and academic role orientation. Using a multivariate approach, individual and organizational predictors of internationalism and the impact of internationalization on productivity were also measured.

In this research, internationalists emerge as a clearly defined subgroup of Polish scientists (51.4%)—in effect, a different academic species as compared to locals. Internationalists are predominantly male (as in Rostan et al. 2014 ; Vabø et al. 2014 ), and this gender differential has powerful policy implications (as voiced by Ackers in her study of internationalization as a form of discrimination ( 2008 )). If an individual’s success in a globally stratified academia depends on research rather than on teaching, service, or administration, and if research success and productivity are driven by international collaboration (Abramo et al. et al. 2011a ), then female scientists are increasingly likely to lose out in terms of funding and prestige. This is especially the case in resource-poor systems where competition is tougher, and the process of internationalization accumulative disadvantage means that the poor get poorer while the rich get richer. International research stratification is more harmful to female scientists because international collaboration is strongly correlated with higher publishing rates (as well as higher citation rates, which are not explored here). In the Polish context, 55% of female scientists are locals, as compared to 44% of their male colleagues. Our findings support conclusions drawn by Abramo et al. ( 2013 ) about Italian scientists: male scientists exhibit higher collaboration rates in international collaboration. Our findings do not, however, support conclusions from Aksnes et al. ( 2019 ), who found that gender is not an important determinant of international research collaboration. Consequently, in the Polish case, women’s progression on the academic ladder is likely to be more difficult and more protracted, with less access to increasingly competitive individual research funding.

Internationalists are also older, with longer academic experience and higher academic degrees and occupying higher academic positions, which aligns with most previous research (as in Jung, Kooij and Teichler 2014 ; Rostan 2015 ; Rostan et al. 2014 ). In resource-poor systems like Poland, internationalists are a majority only among those over 50, with more than 20 years of academic experience and a habilitation degree and associate professorship at minimum. The emerging pattern is clear and statistically significant; only a handful of full professors (74.6% of whom are internationalists) achieve the high levels of research internationalization seen in resource-rich systems. That said, the share of young internationalists is certainly increasing, with highly competitive new research programs funded by the National Research Council (or NCN, founded in 2011) dedicated predominantly to young academics (Bieliński and Tomczyńska 2018 ).

The present findings also align with previous evidence (Kyvik and Larsen 1997 ; Piro et al. ( 2013 ) that internationalization is highly discipline-sensitive. Up to 80% of academics in the physical sciences and mathematics cluster are internationalists as against only 36.3% in the social sciences, as are more than 90% of full professors in the physical sciences and mathematics as compared to only 50% in the social sciences. In the humanities and social sciences, 63.3% of locals do not collaborate domestically either, which means that the “lonely scholar” model prevails, consistently with findings in Lewis ( 2013 ).

Interestingly, international collaboration does not occur at the expense of domestic collaboration; in fact, although this dimension has rarely been studied, internationalists also collaborate extensively at domestic level (Sooryamoorthy 2014 ; Jeong et al. 2011 ). Only 20.5% of internationalists do not collaborate domestically, for unknown reasons that may include lack of time, lack of funding, or limited opportunities to co-publish internationally. At the other extreme, only 50% of locals collaborate domestically—in other words, half of those who do not collaborate internationally also fail to collaborate domestically, again with significant field differentiation.

In terms of research productivity, internationalists co-author internationally six times more often than locals, among whom international co-authorship is marginal (2.1% as compared to 13.8% for internationalists), following the patterns known from literature (Kyvik and Larsen 1997 ; Abramo et al. 2011a ). Across all academic clusters, internationalists consistently produce more than 90% of internationally co-authored publications; in the fields of physics and mathematics, social sciences and life sciences, the figure is 97–99.9%. In these clusters, no international collaboration means no internationally co-authored publications.

Scientists who do not collaborate internationally report very low shares of internationally co-authored publications (3.2% in hard fields and 1.9% in soft fields). The fact that only internationalists are generally involved in large-scale international co-authorship has policy implications, as only a negligible fraction of publications produced by Polish locals are internationally co-authored and depend almost entirely on collaborative activities with international colleagues. Given the current policy goal of increasing Polish visibility in global science, it may be counter-productive to support research locals through additional funding (competitive or otherwise), as this would deprive internationalists of already limited research funds.

The survey instrument facilitated comparison of productivity among internationalists and locals across a wide array of publication types. In every case, internationalists were found to be more productive than locals to a statistically significant extent ( p  < 0.001). Internationalists are clearly much more productive in terms of internationally co-authored publications: for every internationally co-authored article published by locals, internationalists publish 23.2 such articles, and for every internationally co-authored article equivalent, internationalists publish 16 such article equivalents. Internationalists are a world apart from locals in terms of international co-authorship and almost three times as productive in terms of publications in English.

In terms of work-time distribution and academic role orientation, Polish academia is fairly traditional. Internationalists tend to spend less time than locals do on teaching-related activities, more time on research, and more time on administrative duties, with cross-disciplinary differentials in total weekly work-time distribution (as suggested by Fox 1992 ; Ramsden 1994 ; Stephan 2012 ). In terms of work patterns, the largest gap was observed in the social sciences, where internationalists spend an average of 64 additional days each year on academic activities. Internationalists also exhibit higher research role orientation; in contrast, locals are more teaching-oriented. A primary interest in teaching virtually excludes Polish scientists from the class of internationalists, of whom only 1.1% are primarily teaching-oriented.

From a European comparative perspective (Kwiek 2018a ), the share of internationalists in Poland is low, and the share of young internationalists is very low. However, Poland is not an outlier and belongs to a cluster of internationalization laggards, together with Germany, Portugal, and Italy—a cluster that can be contrasted with a cluster of internationalization leaders (comprising the Netherlands, Ireland, Austria, and Switzerland). The share of internationalists in the latter cluster reaches 75–80%, and in the former cluster it is in the range of 50–60%. However, for the youngest generation, the difference between the countries with 80% of young scientists collaborating internationally (as in the Netherlands, Ireland, and the United Kingdom) and those with 40% collaborating internationally (as in Germany, Poland, and Portugal) may be a strong barrier to intra-European collaboration in the future. The reasons for international non-collaboration certainly differ from country to country. While severe research underfunding would figure prominently among major factors in Poland, good research funding and the large size of the science system (the second largest in Europe after the United Kingdom) would be a major factor in Germany.

Multivariate analyses identified some new predictors of international research collaboration. Variables that substantially increase the odds of being a research internationalist include full professorship, working in a hard academic discipline, working long research hours, international co-authorship, and individual rather than institutional international linkages. Unsurprisingly in the Polish context, independent variables related to teaching were negatively correlated with international productivity. There was also statistical evidence of the traditional teaching/research trade-off in Polish academia. Among internationalization-related independent variables, long-term stays abroad and foreign PhD awards were not generally positively correlated with productivity, confirming previous findings about mobility, collaboration, and productivity (Ackers 2008 ; Kyvik and Larsen 1997 ; Rostan et al. 2014 ).

Our next steps include a comparison of the internationalist/local contrast as it emerges from survey data, with a parallel contrast emergent from publication and citation data. The usefulness of the present definition of internationalists as scientists who collaborate internationally in research will be compared with the usefulness of a bibliometric definition of internationalists as scientists with a certain proportion of articles published through international collaboration in their individual publication portfolios (within a given timeframe). While a limitation of research in survey-based cross-national comparative studies is cost (coordination, funding for national teams, time invested in data collection and cleaning in specific national contexts etc.), in bibliometric-based research, these costs can be substantially reduced once specific datasets have been built. For future Polish case studies, we will use “The Polish Science Observatory” dataset. This dataset has full administrative, biographical, and bibliometric data concerning 100,000 scientists and their 400,000 Scopus-indexed articles published in the decade 2009–2018. And for cross-national comparative research, we will use our global bibliometric dataset of 27.6 million articles published in the OECD area by authors from 1874 institutions (with at least 3000 articles) in the same period, with a number of gender-defining algorithms, software, and global datasets. Both datasets are maintained by the Center for Public Policy Studies and will be periodically updated.

In sum, the present findings confirm the stratifying power of international collaboration in a science system in transition from severe underfunding and a strong national focus to more affluent but highly competitive funding and a strong international focus. Internationalists and locals are different in terms of how they work, how they think about their roles, and how they publish and collaborate. They also face different barriers in securing academic promotion and research funding. The balance of research internationalists and locals is currently about 50–50, but this is bound to change in an emergent system that is focused increasingly on research internationalization.

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Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the National Ministry of Science and Higher Education through its Dialogue grant 0022/DLG/2019/10 (RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES). The support of Dr. Wojciech Roszka is also gratefully acknowledged. Finally, my exceptional gratitude goes to the two anonymous reviewers for their patience and highly constructive, detailed criticism of the original manuscript.

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Kwiek, M. Internationalists and locals: international research collaboration in a resource-poor system. Scientometrics 124 , 57–105 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03460-2

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The OSU IRB must review all international research projects involving human subjects to ensure that the appropriate provisions are in place to protect the rights and welfare of study subjects. The safeguards must be at least equivalent to the protections afforded by the U.S. regulations pertaining to the protection of human subjects in research (45 CFR 46).

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• For information about setting up an Ethics Review Committee (ERC) in a global setting, see World Health Organization (WHO) Research Ethics . 

Additional Considerations for International Research

• The consent documents must be in a language understandable to the proposed participants. The IRB will not verify the accuracy of translated document. Therefore, a back translation may be required unless this requirement can be waived based on the qualifications of the translator.  For more information about how the IRB defines who is a qualified translator, please refer to section 10.4(d) of the OSU Policies and Procedures . Translated consent documents and any applicable back translations must be provided to the IRB along with the credentials of the translator detailed in Section 17.5 of the application and protocol form. Translated documents will be processed (stamped) in a manner consistent with documents presented in English.
• There may be circumstances under which verbal consent is more appropriate than written consent. For more information, please refer to the section pertaining to Waiver of Documentation of Informed Consent in the OSU Policies and Procedures .

Compensation

• As with all compensation, investigators must take care to avoid unduly influencing subjects. Investigators should consider local context when determining the amount, type, and/or method of payment.The remuneration should be described in the compensation section of the application and protocol form in terms of its value in the U.S. and local context. This section of the protocol should also include a description of payment in relative terms (i.e., payment equates to a day’s work, hourly salary, or another local reference) (Duke University, 2011).Compensation need not be monetary and can include items such as food, gift cards, transportation reimbursement, household supplies, etc.

Local Contact Information

• The consent form should include local contact information that is appropriate and feasible for the subject populations. Examples include phone and/or email for local co-investigators, name of community leader, Ministry of Health, coordinator for a non-governmental organization (NGO), and local IRB or ethics committee. 
• Note: The consent form does not have to include the OSU IRB contact information on studies where that is not a reasonable requirement, e.g. participants do not speak English and/or they do not have access to international calling or email.

Non-English Speakers

• Translations of consent documents, recruitment materials, test instruments, and/or other materials that will be seen by the participant must be submitted to the IRB for review in addition to the English version of the documents.
• To ensure that the translations are accurate for the specific community of study, it is recommended that a local contact person verify the translations.
• If local translators will be used to facilitate the research, Section 17.5 of the application and protocol form should include details about how translators are trained in confidentiality and protocol adherence.  
• In instances where the data to be collected have the potential to cause social stigmatization, researchers and other study personnel should use care in selecting an appropriate field assistant or on-site translator to ensure that participant confidentiality is maintained. In some cases, local customs may require that the translator/field assistant be drawn from the community. In this case, the researcher/study personnel should also train the assistant about not unduly influencing a participant to respond to questions that s/he may otherwise not wish to answer (Seattle University, 2014). This training should also be outlined in the Training and Oversight section of the protocol.

Data Security 

• Every effort should be made to save research data to the OSU server.
• If it not immediately feasible to save data to the OSU server, a description of how data will be securely stored electronically and/or in paper format while both on site and in transit should be included in Section 30, question 7 and/or Section 34 of the application and protocol form. Please refer to the OSU Data Security Guidance for additional requirements. 
• Once back in the United States, data should be saved in accordance with OSU data security guidance.

Export Control/Embargoed Countries

• If you are planning to conduct research in an embargoed country , please indicate in your protocol and contact the OSU Export Control and International Compliance Office .

Local Context

Relevant local context information should be included in the IRB protocol. This includes, but it not limited to, the following:

• A description of the research team’s knowledge of or experience in the host country as well as any relevant qualifications for conducting the proposed research within the international setting should be included in Section 20, question 3 and/or Section 39 of the application and protocol form.
• Cities, regions countries where research will be conducted
• Scientific/ethical justification for conducting the research in an international setting
• Economic status of the country/community
• Current events or socio-political environment in the country that may impact research conduct or alter the risks or benefits to subjects
• Societal and cultural beliefs in the country that may impact research conduct or alter the risks or benefits to subjects
• If women and children are part of the subject population, their role in the society, including their autonomy and legal capacity to make decisions.
• If there are circumstances in which women or community members do not have the autonomy to make decisions for themselves, the plan for obtaining informed consent from both the study subject and any additional authority figures should be included in Section 17.3 of the application and protocol form.
• Literacy rate of the potential subject population
• Languages and dialects of the potential subject population
• Involvement of organizations, community leaders, or experts in engaging the subject population or conducting the research
• Relevance of the research to the area’s health, economic, educational, or other needs
• Distribution of risks and current and future benefits (Tufts University, 2014).
• A description of how the plan for recruitment and subject selection will avoid undue influence or favoritism within the subject population.

Mandatory Reporting

• Indicate what local laws govern reporting of child abuse in the country of study, if applicable.
• Provide a plan if you encounter suspected child abuse or neglect.
• Indicate in the consent form your plan for reporting suspected child abuse or neglect to local authorities, if applicable.
• NOTE: Under Oregon Law, employees of the University are required to report instances of child abuse to Oregon Authorities regardless of where the child abuse occurred. However, the IRB has had multiple conversations with Oregon authorities and it is unclear what would happen with that information. Therefore, while it is still required and should be included in the application and protocol form, disclosure to Oregon Authorities does not need to be added to the consent form, as it is unlikely to pose a risk to participants within the country of study.
• Additional information about mandatory reporting can be found on the OSU Equal Opportunity and Access website and on the Oregon Department of Human Services website .

Project Revisions

• All revisions or amendments to an approved study must be reviewed and approved by the IRB prior to initiating the change(s) regardless of the location of research. Changes that are required by local IRBs or communities must be submitted to the OSU IRB prior to initiation. Please see the HRPP project revision  guidance for more information.

Lab Tests in an International Setting

• If lab tests will be performed in an international setting, additional information may be required. Please see the Guidance for CLIA Certification for additional Information.

International Travel Resources on the OSU Campus

While the personal safety of OSU employees and students conducting research outside the United States is outside the purview of the IRB, there are relevant resources available on campus.

• Office of Global Opportunities guidance for students about Health and Safety while studying or traveling abroad
• Office of Risk Management, International Travel Requirements for OSU Employees
• Office of Export Control and International Compliance information about international travel
• Student Health Services Travel Clinic

Cornell University (2014), Human Research Participant Protection Program: Guidance on IRB Review of International Research

Duke University (2011), International Research 

Seattle University (2014), Research in International Settings

Tufts University (2014), International Research Guidance & Checklist

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International research poses unique and complex ethical challenges. To review a study that is being conducted in an international setting and/or with international participants, the IRB HSR requires additional information about the study and its participants. Although we work to maintain a Board with a broad range of expertise, it is impossible to cover the diverse groups that are studied by our researchers. It is important to provide the IRB HSR with more details about the participants, appropriately identify risks to the participants, and describe how you will minimize those risks. Doing so will help the IRB HSR to accurately review your study and will demonstrate your preparedness for conducting your study. This section details specific information the IRB HSR needs to know as well as provides guidance for navigating and conducting research in an international setting and/or with international participants

• You must obtain IRB approval before your study can begin.  Whether you are a UVA faculty member, staff or student, your research study must be approved by the IRB before it can begin. To reduce confusion, make sure you have the IRB's approval before you leave the country. We suggest you apply to the IRB at least 3-6 months before you leave to ensure adequate time for reviews. Bring your written IRB approval with you on your trip.
• Demonstrate cultural understanding and sensitivity . Is the typical process of signing an informed consent document culturally acceptable for your study? Are there other cultural barriers you might encounter once you arrive? The protocol should describe any anticipated cultural sensitivities of conducting your research and how you intend to overcome those barriers. The IRB will help you develop alternative methods for consent (or other issues) to ensure your research practices are ethically sound and respectful of the culture in which you are doing your research. 
• Understand the research ethics guidelines of the host country. Investigators will be required to obtain IRB approval for research done internationally from the UVA IRB as well as from the local IRB/Ethics Committee within the country in which you will be doing your research. The approval from the local IRB/Ethics committee must be on file with the UVA IRB prior to the UVA IRB granting approval. The IRB strongly recommends you clearly understand the host country's requirements for reviewing and approving human subject research. Some countries have clear ethical guidelines that must be met for conducting domestic and/or international research. Other countries will not have a formal process but might rely on other neighboring countries to assist with the review. The Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) has information on over 133 countries regarding their expectations for ethical committee review as well as information about human subject research laws. See the OHRP International Compilation of Human Research Standards f or more resources on researching your international location. If you determine that you will need a local IRB/ethical committee review, you will need to provide the UVA IRB HSR with contact information for the other IRB as well as documentation of their approval.
• Please contact the IRB while abroad if you encounter any problems or need to change your IRB-approved protocol. If you find that upon arrival in the host country, some aspects of your research study must be modified for whatever reason, please notify the IRB office immediately. The IRB will do its best to quickly respond to your notification with further instructions and guidance. Please wait to hear back from the IRB before making any changes to your protocol! 

Additional items to consider:

Traditionally, international research involves the researcher flying to a distant location to gather data from participants in that country. While those studies are still an important part of international research, it is possible to conduct international research and stay in Charlottesville as well. If your study includes any of the following, you will need to create at least one International Research Data Source: 

• International Primary data source: data are collected by the principal investigator and/or the research team, and data are collected outside of the United States.
• International Secondary data source: data are collected by an individual or institution other than the principal investigator and/or research team, and data are collected outside of the United States.

If you are conducting the research in multiple international locations, particularly if the locations involve multiple IRB reviews and/or local researcher/mentors, please make this distinction in your IRB-HSR protocol/application.

Questions to Consider

The location can be specific or broad, as needed (i.e. Munich, Germany vs Europe) as long as it makes sense with the study. If the study takes place in multiple locations, consider making multiple International Research Data Sources.

Is there a local researcher or local mentor associated with this site?

If you are student researcher (undergraduate/graduate) the board expects you to have a qualified local researcher or mentor who can guide you through the nuances of collecting data in your international location. This individual should be qualified to advise you about local customs, laws, and expectations regarding research, recruitment and consent processes, ethical reviews, and data collection/storage. If you are accessing data from an international source and not traveling abroad, there may be some instances in which a faculty sponsor with adequate experience can act as the “local mentor,” but you should contact our office first before making this determination. The local mentor should be listed on the protocol and needs to have CITI training or an equivalent human subject’s research training certification. Faculty are not required to have a local mentor. 

Will you require a translator to interact with participants?

If you are conducting a study where the participants speak a language other than English and you are not fluent in the language, you will need a translator. When determining fluency, you should verify that your language skills are adequate for the technical information you will provide participants. For example, you may feel confident discussing weather or even politics, but do you feel confident that you can discuss the concepts in the consent form at a level that makes sense to the participants in their native language? In addition, are you confident that you can write appropriate recruitment and consent form materials? If not, you should have a translator.

Are recruitment/consent materials required for this site? / Will recruitment/consent materials be provided in a language other than English?

Briefly describe the process for translating the recruitment and consent materials. This may be somewhat redundant if you have already discussed use of a translator, but it is important for the board to understand this process as not all studies engage a translator.

GDPR - General Data Protection Regulation

If your study will take place in the European Union or United Kingdom or uses data from citizens of those regions, your study will be subject to the GDPR. Please review the GDPR section and access the  GDPR Informed Consent Addendum  to include with your consent materials at the time of initial review or with a modification.

GDPR applies to select data when collected from individuals located in the European Economic Area (EEA) and/or the United Kingdom (UK). GDPR regulates the collection, use, disclosure, or other processing of personal data. If you are collecting personal data in the EEA or UK, or if your participants reside in those areas, you are subject to the GDPR. If your participants are EEA or UK subjects but are outside of the EEA or UK when the data collection occurs, the data collected is not subject to the GDPR.

While many of the US federal regulations mirror the requirements in the GDPR, the GDPR requires researchers to provide additional consent form content and conduct specific processes related to data collection. While this section and the GDPR Informed Consent Addendum provides some guidance on what is required under the GDPR, please note that individual countries may have varied interpretations, etc. It is important that you familiarize yourself with the laws and regulations of the country(ies) in which you will conduct research and seek counsel if needed. Again, please refer to the OHRP International Compilation of Human Research Standards which provides a compilation of information on the GDPR and how it is interpreted in various countries. You will want to use the GDPR Informed Consent Addendum to ensure that you have provided participants with the appropriate information required by the GDPR.

Useful Website Links:

Consent Form Template for International Research

Ethical and Policy Issues in International Research: Clinical Trials in Developing Countries

NIH: Global Clinical Regulations

International Compilation of Human Subject Protections  

Harvard Global Research Ethics Map

Center for Global Health Opportunities

CITI Module

International Studies (ID 971)

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Challenges of Researchers in Conducting International Study during the Eruption of COVID-19: Student and Mentor Perspectives

Jenail mobaraka.

1 Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of California Berkeley, 340 Stephens Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-2314, USA; ude.yelekreb@akarabomj

Lian Elkazzaz

2 Global Studies, University of California Berkeley, 101 Stephens Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-2306, USA; ude.yelekreb@zazzaklenail

Niveen Rizkalla

Associated data.

Not applicable.

Conducting an international research study may bear various challenges; however, during the global COVID-19 crisis, such a study undertakes unpredictable trajectories. This paper explores the challenges experienced by researchers studying Syrian refugees’ physical and mental health and aid workers serving under humanitarian organizations in Lebanon. It includes information about the changes in the study’s goals and design with the emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2, as necessitated by the circumstances COVID-19 imposed. It focuses on the unique perspectives of the research team of two students and their mentor who faced multiple challenges while involved in the study, and their narratives and subjective experiences that led to new opportunities for growth in the project. The research team specifically engaged in humanistic and existential psychology in order to conduct research in a manner conducive to personal and professional development, productivity and growth. To conclude, the researchers propose recommendations to the academic community on mitigating some of the challenges faced when conducting international research, and suggestions to the humanitarian sector serving vulnerable populations in conflict zones during COVID-19.

1. Introduction

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the international community has come to a breaking point. Borders have been closed, economies have suffered and communities have lived in fear of potential viral transmission. Academic research activities were significantly hampered, field visits and data collection were paralyzed and funding resources were frozen and halted [ 1 ]. In our study, the existing challenges of conducting international field work research in Lebanon’s precarious socio-economic and political conditions were compounded by the complex implications of COVID-19.

This paper explores the challenges encountered by the team of researchers from two perspectives: the students’ perspectives, the first two authors, and the mentor’s perspective, the third author. The paper begins with a brief background on the study and its complex circumstances and proceeds to the subjective perspectives of each researcher’s personal experience. The authors’ experiences will engage in a humanistic and existential psychology scholarship and its relevance to the process of this study.

In the initial study design, the research team approached contacts in the Middle East. It established connections with on-the-ground nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating in Lebanon, which provide services to Syrian refugees and local Lebanese in need. The study titled “Violent Conflict, Physical and Mental Health Needs of Syrian Refugees in Lebanon” aimed to examine the physical and mental health conditions and unmet needs of Syrian refugees who reside in the urban areas of Lebanon. The initial goals of the study did not include the impacts of COVID-19 on the targeted population. The students were set to travel to Lebanon to gather survey data from Syrian refugees and conduct semi-structured interviews with staff of the NGOs frequented by Syrian refugees for aid and services. However, due to COVID-19, travel-related restrictions were put into effect, which prevented the implementation of the initial study design, as well as changed the goals of the study. Various risks and ethical concerns, which arose around the continuation of the study, included the possibility of the students’ immediate deportation from Lebanon, their inability to return to the United States, and most importantly, the risk of transmitting the virus unknowingly to the already vulnerable refugee population and service providers who were assisting them. Moreover, the academic institution with which the team was affiliated has determined a strong preference for human subjects research to be limited, “unless it was in the best interest of the subjects” (R. Katz, personal communication, 16 March 2020). Thus, out of moral and ethical values, the study immediately shifted to be remote and focused on semi-structured interviews with only the staff of NGOs. The initial goals and design of the study to examine Syrian refugees’ physical and mental health needs—collected firsthand from refugees and NGO staff—were changed to examining Syrian refugees’ conditions as they were perceived by staff, as well as the physical and mental health consequences for staff due to their trauma work, while considering the impacts of COVID-19 on both refugees and staff [ 2 , 3 ].

During the COVID-19 pandemic, staff faced extreme limitations as a result of quarantine. This included the stress and mental health effects of deteriorating global conditions, changes in family dynamics and the enmeshment of boundaries, as well as complexities in the work–life balance, which shifted to a work-from-home life balance [ 4 ]. Staff had to rapidly adjust to their organizations’ new health and safety guidelines and faced increased workloads in serving communities who were struggling under shelter-in-place policies. As a collective society, social-distancing imposed difficulties on staff in restricting their social encounters, daily responsibilities, caregiving to family elderly/parents and their community support, which mostly includes frequent physical touch as a survival need, as well as a social and cultural norm for expressing human affection and warmth, especially common in the Middle East.

The shelter-in-place policies and the difficulties of conducting an international study during a pandemic was doubly challenging on researchers as well. Most participants were at home and therefore did not have access to the same work environment they did in their offices. This included a lack of private office space and the limited availability of a wireless connection; a condition in Lebanon where electricity inconsistencies are commonplace [ 5 ]. The limited internet connectivity forced researchers to only audio-record, rather than video-record aid workers, which had the benefits of minimizing a breach in participants’ confidentiality and enabled a safe space, but on the other hand, it narrowed the human interaction and nonverbal communication (e.g., body language, facial expressions) necessary for understanding emotional states. Furthermore, the 10-h time difference between Lebanon and California (Pacific Standard Time) posed additional stress. Establishing a rapport with participants in order to gather the data was paramount, but external distractions proved significant and required additional attention, flexibility and care [ 6 , 7 ].

Conducting an international study in the Middle East regardless of a pandemic is complex in itself. In terms of interviewer–interviewee dynamics, coming from a prestigious American academic institution to interview participants from the Middle East generates diverse power imbalances [ 8 ]. Participants were accustomed to interacting with American and other Western institutions in more formal donor–recipient relationships, rather than being interviewed about their personal working conditions and mental health, in addition to the physical and mental health of refugees and the locals they served. Moreover, the difference in cultural norms between participants and interviewers required adjustment for a cohesive and comfortable interview experience [ 9 , 10 ]. Ultimately, the dynamics of research conducted in the Middle East—where colonialism dominated the past, but still has many impacts on the reality in the present—by American researchers were only made more complex by the complications of living through a global pandemic and performing remote interviews.

All the aforementioned challenges have particular implications in the complicated socio-economic and political Lebanese terrain. Since October of 2019, Lebanon has undergone significant political upheavals, with millions of protestors taking to the streets to voice their frustration with governmental austerity and rapidly declining economic conditions [ 11 , 12 ]. Further, no one could have predicted the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and its disastrous implications on the already vulnerable Lebanese state’s economy. The consequences were so grave that protests only took a brief hiatus with the imposition of government shelter-in-place orders, but reignited due to economic unrest.

Syrian refugees, the primary population we had interest in studying, have been severely impacted by both the economic–political tensions and the COVID-19 conditions in Lebanon. To some degree, everyone in the world has felt the invasion of this crisis in their personal, professional, financial and familial lives [ 13 ]. For refugees who have already lived through the traumatic events of war, horror journeys of escape and who were barely surviving the extreme post-displacement poverty and survival challenges in the host country [ 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 ], their sense of insecurity and shattered safety have been further fragmented and ruptured. COVID-19 has created an inhumane hostage situation for refugees recuperating from the wounds and the ramifications of war. The refugee experience is one of forced displacement—crossing borders to flee the violence within their homelands—in search of shelter, protection and freedom. However, with a borderless global crisis like COVID-19 looming, safety remains out of reach and exacerbates refugees’ predicament. Thus, COVID-19 was evidenced as a complex, multilayered, prolonged global and shared trauma, which has an adverse and disproportionate impact on Middle Eastern minorities [ 21 ]. Its impact on minorities, among which are Syrian refugees, was found to elevate PTSD symptoms, depression and anxiety due to prolonged economic and lockdown acute stressors, discrimination, as well as multiple ongoing traumatizations and their cumulative and proliferation dynamics [ 21 , 22 ].

2. Student Perspective: The First Author

As a senior in college, this project was my first opportunity to engage in research so thoroughly. It is not often that an undergraduate student gets the level of access that I did into scholarship of this magnitude. Despite this being an incredible opportunity, there also existed a personal need and pressure to complete this project. Conducting original research and writing an accompanying undergraduate thesis is a requirement for graduation and was meant to be the culmination of four years of arduous and thoughtful study in this field.

With the news of shelter-in-place and subsequent travel restrictions, funding I had previously secured to support my field research was rescinded because of federal restrictions on travel. The inability to conduct the in-person interviews our team planned was particularly difficult for me as it could not be postponed and would push back my graduation until the project was completed. Coming from a background where I had little experience in conducting research and with my ability to graduate linked to the successful completion of this project, my stress increased significantly. However, my determination to continue the project did not solely lie in a fear of sunk costs or failure. The opportunity to conduct this study, under the circumstances of a global pandemic, encompassed a humanitarian purpose: finding new meaning in life and a valuable responsibility, a personal vocation and mission as a Syrian American researcher, in the hope to serve my people in delivering the voices of their suffering to the public eye. Eric Fromm’s [ 23 ] analysis of the human condition may explain the mixture of excitement and distress I felt upon embarking on such a journey; with the freedom to choose comes a tremendous responsibility, and into that burdening role of authentically and truly vocalizing my people’s torment, protrudes anxiety.

As a Syrian American, I expected discomfort in conducting research related to the Syrian refugee crisis. I understood that hearing the stories of war survivors would be deeply upsetting as I am a Syrian who felt close to the conflict, but I did my best to prepare. Nonetheless and despite my preparations, the inhumane conditions Syrian refugees endured during COVID-19, especially those described by aid workers, many of whom were Syrian refugees themselves, were the most inspiring and painful narratives to which I was exposed. I was saddened to discover that structural violence imposed on refugees during COVID-19 was even more dehumanizing of their already fragile conditions. The pandemic exacerbated their needs and limited their access to services, which resulted in keeping them physically isolated, socially demonized and consequently made the public panic from mortality threats more tangible [ 24 , 25 ]. Refugees were alienated and abandoned to cope with minimal governmental assistance, which left all the burden and responsibility on humanitarian organizations and their staff.

Aid workers had become overwhelmed due to the increased amount of support they had to provide to their beneficiaries in remote interactions, new project implementation and their own personal statuses as residents, or as Syrian refugees who worked in Lebanon. Many considered themselves in an emergency situation and had to take calls and complete tasks after work hours, in addition to dealing with their own disturbed routines and economic stressors. These circumstances imposed additional challenges in scheduling a convenient time for interviews or conducting the interviews in a space that provided privacy.

Further into the research process, the effects of interviewing, transcribing and analyzing the responses of aid workers became difficult. COVID-19 had burdened and slowed down all activities, which at times felt extremely heavy to me and made the transcribing process slower than I anticipated [ 6 , 26 ]. Mental and physical fatigue had started to show its impact with a feeling of emptiness looming over and slowing the process further.

In the struggle to defeat this exhaustion among our research team, we needed to remind ourselves “why are we doing this?” The sense of purpose and sacrifice aid workers shared with me has inspired me, especially that of Syrian refugees, who felt obligated and committed to help their people and vocalize their suffering. I made a choice and drew strength to persist for the sake of the same meaningful goal they held onto; we were united by a meaning we had to fulfill [ 27 ]. Nietzsche’s words of wisdom, cited by [ 27 ] helped in understanding their mission and my own: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how”. Meaning-making is an important tool for coping with physical and mental health through life challenges such as adversity, crisis and trauma [ 28 ]; however, it was limited, especially among aid workers [ 2 , 3 , 29 ], and I have only encountered a few academic studies demonstrating similar impacts on researchers.

Practically, in order to persist and overcome this challenge, our research team agreed to edit each other’s interviews after finalizing the initial transcriptions. Analysis was conducted independently, which proceeded with group analyses and discussions on the final codes. The team shared the progress of the work via a group file, wherein all finalized materials were added by each researcher. This mutual responsibility and transparency of working together as a group improved our motivation and productivity, since the progression of the study depended on each team member’s contribution. This process particularly enlightened my understanding on how resourceful we were as a team, the power of solidarity [ 30 ] and how fortunate we were in being able to live in a country that still enjoyed abundance under such circumstances, especially in comparison to our participants. This realization and sense of gratitude allowed us as a research team to establish authentic relationships among one another, which were interwoven with empowered feelings of love and belongingness.

The friendships we formed with each other served as solace for me when the community was scarce, scattered, or too overwhelmed to offer any support. Our relationships also served as motivation for working through the project, even when it was emotionally taxing. Our resiliency in the face of unimagined challenges gave me hope for the future and a purpose in learning from the stories of aid workers I interviewed. My encounters with participants were filled with compassionate human connections that were not hampered despite being virtual.

Conducting international research during this time has been filled with challenges I never expected to face as an undergraduate student. However, because of the adaptation in this study I developed my research skills while limiting the margin of error that may have occurred in the field as a first-time researcher. Having spent four years studying the Middle East and personally being invested in the outcomes of the Syrian conflict, this project was gratifying at the culmination of my college career. This study taught me a lot about researchers’ existential need of walking alongside participants with sensitivity, the shared humanity between the researchers and participants [ 26 ], and the essence of compassion.

3. Student Perspective: The Second Author

Islamic tradition offers a saying, translated roughly as, “don’t hate something; it could be good for you”. I often found myself returning to this verse through our research project and the unfolding of the COVID-19 crisis. In its early stages, COVID-19 struck with collective fear and panic and revealed existential anxieties [ 13 ].

As a research team, we closely watched every development to plan our next moves. We sought travel and research-related guidance from the university and tracked the closure of airports and imposition of increasing travel restrictions globally. Ultimately, several months of planning unraveled over the span of two weeks. In making the decision to indefinitely postpone our travel plans, my frustrations exceeded my capacity as a student-researcher with disrupted plans. My Lebanese heritage emerged at the forefront of my thinking and I was left devastated at the prospect of losing the opportunity to reconnect with my family in Lebanon and revisit my invisible home and collective roots for the foreseeable future.

At the time of this project, I was a third-year undergraduate and a new transfer student from a community college. Thus, I had minimal research experience and faced a substantial learning curve. Prior to undertaking this project, I had never heard of research scales, much less tailored an entire project according to my interests. I quickly found myself doing work I previously thought inaccessible to undergraduates; I learned to code and analyzed transcripts and aided in protocol writing of the Institutional Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects review board.

Theoretically, government-imposed lockdowns would work to our advantage, as participants were working from home and would likely have a greater capacity to participate. In practice, we found that in the early days of lockdown, the world was still adjusting to life at home and social distancing. For weeks, our entire lives had been consumed by the virus; it occupied our thoughts, conversations and wedged its way into our relationships.

This invasion of sorts was abundantly present in my interviews through the demeanor of my participants, their responses and their outlooks. My questions were often met with “before COVID-19 or now?” It became clearer with each interview that participants were not interested in talking about circumstances prior to the onset of COVID-19. While I set out to learn about Syrian refugees’ legal and economic status in Lebanon, participants were more concerned with the implications of the rapidly deteriorating economy due to lockdown measures on the already extremely vulnerable refugee population. Thus, interview questions were modified to address the new goals of the study in examining aid workers’ current needs, concerns, and subjective experiences during the pandemic [ 6 ]. Although social and economic disparities have always been observed in Lebanon, I was still devastated to witness how COVID-19 intensified them, to the extent of splitting Lebanon aggressively into local-Lebanese and nonlocal refugees. During the pandemic, refugees were vilified, othered, and became even further alienated and feared. As a result, they suffered from heightened hostility and discrimination [ 21 ]. Hostility and micro-aggression were present in our interviews, when Lebanese aid workers articulated their professional opinions and perspectives on refugees while trying to hide their personal derogatory criticism and stigmatized attitudes.

Despite the complexity of conducting remote interviews, I bonded with many of my participants over our shared difficulties with working from home, the mental toll of quarantine and the emotional weight of witnessing the world’s uncertain state. As different as our circumstances were, I identified with my interviewees who, like myself, were working from home in less-than-ideal conditions, often with our families in the next room. I frequently found myself in an apology tug-of-war with the person on the other line, each insisting our regret for our poor internet connection. During the interviews, I learned how to differentiate between the line dis-connectivity and the silence I needed to allow in the conversation as a space for participants’ reflection [ 6 ] and gradually internalized not to fear from such silence [ 31 ].

In my previous academic and personal experience, I have found that navigating the Lebanese socio-political arena was tantamount to navigating a minefield. As a Lebanese person in the diaspora, I have always been invested in understanding the material conditions of the most vulnerable populations in the country. The personal narratives of aid workers have illustrated to me the magnitude of the challenges they and refugees face in ways that my past observations as an outsider could not. The participants effectively took my hand and walked me through the complexities of their work and lives in the Lebanese context. They discussed the technicalities of aid-related work in the Lebanese field, but also opened themselves up to be intimate and vulnerable with a stranger. By the conclusion of the interview process, I had discovered far more than what we initially sought out. Participants shared in great detail the structures of the NGOs serving refugees and highlighted their competition for the resources necessary to provide relief. I also identified my own vulnerabilities and learned new self-care techniques, as well as coping with pain, stress and trauma. Aid workers taught me about finding meaning and growth in humanitarian work and the factors which drove them to commit their professional and often personal lives in the service of others, despite the ever-present risk of secondary trauma [ 3 , 32 ].

However, the most important lesson they taught me was on how fragile we are as humans when confronting conflicts and disasters such as a pandemic, but not inasmuch as how resilient we could be in the most unanticipated moments; as in Nietzsche’s [ 33 ] vastly quoted affirmation: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”. One of the Syrian participants attested that her son was killed in the war and she was still mourning his loss. Nonetheless, she was devoted and determined to contribute to other refugees at work. Her testimony reverberated within me how the personal, professional and political could not be differentiated, especially under the most miserable conditions, which force a person to transcend one’s self. She lost her son, but she wasn’t lost, she didn’t lose her will to live and survive, she said “yes” to life despite her loss and embraced an abundant lifestyle in the service of others.

Writing and disseminating this manuscript were also complex and anxiety provoking, especially in that journal reviews were also slowed down due to the pandemic circumstances and the unique scope of this paper, which did not always yield a perfect fit to journals’ aims. However, reading about Frankl’s determination—while being in a concentration camp, he clung onto rewriting his destroyed manuscript, which gave him a purpose to live and forced him to rise above his suffering—left our team with a feeling of awe. We too could not bear the thought of not finalizing this work under less severe conditions. The lessons we learned about the human capacity to make the best of any given situation by creatively turning negative aspects into constructive ones, under all circumstances, were tremendous. Acknowledging how meaningful our work and the relationships we established, have inspired us to change our attitudes towards the challenges of dissemination and to transcend above the quarantine sense of emptiness into proactively writing the manuscript. This has even rendered new opportunities for resilience and growth [ 27 ]. From this research team emerged loving and life-long friendships and as Yang [ 30 ] (p. 558) articulated: “it takes a team to accomplish important things”. In the rigorous academic environment through which we came together, this is a rarity. The nature of our dynamic provided collaborative space and support, which I will always value as essential components of success in every research endeavor, project and human interaction.

4. Mentor Perspective: The Third Author

Prior to COVID-19, my main concern as a mentor was related to the possible adverse impacts of secondary traumatic stress [ 32 ] and vicarious traumatization [ 34 ] of the students due to their involvement in a study that encompasses exposure to traumatic narratives. The students conducting the study were not professionally trained for their encounter with Syrian refugees who endured multiple traumatic events and prolonged survival stressors [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]. Therefore, the student researchers were at risk of potential harm in experiencing refugee PTSD-similar symptoms due to their field work-related exposure [ 2 , 3 , 35 , 36 ]. I was also concerned that the students’ lack of experience in interviewing traumatized populations, may result in causing discomfort or re-traumatization of participants [ 37 ]. Therefore, prior to the planned travel to Lebanon, I provided the students with training on conducting such a study, interviewing participants, participants’ vulnerability and potential benefits, self-care techniques, as well as increasing their awareness of the risk to their well-being as a consequence of their empathetic involvement with refugees via weekly in-person supervision meetings [ 37 , 38 ].

However, with the eruption of COVID-19, my concern amplified to include the potential harm to students as they were in similar circumstances to the study’s participants. They not only empathized with participants by putting themselves in their shoes, but they also identified with the participants being quarantined at home. This unusual and complex situation placed my students in a position defined as “Shared Traumatic Reality” [ 39 , 40 ]. Both the students and participants lived and worked under quarantine. This stressful context was at times traumatizing. Personally, I was also under quarantine, maneuvering parenting and academic work and faced similar stressful challenges; however, I needed to remain functional to provide my students with remote support and practical solutions during the research process. The more COVID-19 was hovering like an existential threatening cloud over our heads, the more the awareness of death became tangible and the greater my urge intensified in clinging onto life, similarly to confronting death as described by Irvin Yalom’s book [ 41 ] “The Gift of Therapy”. Though Yalom describes a more general awareness of death, my awareness of death was contextualized by the particular experience of fear due to the COVID-19 circumstances. Choosing life and living for me were reflected in a zest of vitality, enhanced awareness of the study’s importance and rarity, and a hectic working pace. Therefore, my relationship with my students intensified and became significant to a degree that they have saved me from isolation, lack of creativity and the ever-changing sense of uselessness and degrading meaninglessness [ 27 ].

The sudden change in the global spread of the virus made the study’s initial implementation plans impossible. Despite both students’ extreme desire to travel, I had to consult with administrative officials and colleagues regarding the university’s restrictions on travel. It was a difficult decision I had to make, bearing in mind both the health and safety of the students and participants, as well as the threat of the students’ inability to return to the United States from Lebanon. After long discussions with the students and navigating their disappointment and frustration, we decided to adhere to the university’s code of conduct and new guidelines and adjusted the study according to the new requirements the IRB office placed regarding international projects. This decision resulted in compromising many of the initial research goals that would have provided a person-centered holistic perspective on refugees’ conditions from both refugees and aid workers [ 42 ]. Instead, we accepted the fact that data collected might provide only partial information gathered from only aid workers and according to their subjective points of view. This solution of dividing the research into phases, wherein the first phase was conducted remotely, provided some relief to students and allowed for an easier adjustment to the remote phase.

Afterwards, the study’s team started preparing for the changes ahead. First, I contacted all the collaborating NGOs and informed them of the changes pertaining to our inability to conduct the study physically in Lebanon and gained their approval to conduct remote interviews with their staff. The response from organizations was slow due to being overwhelmed with the changes occurring globally and locally and the new stress their organizations faced in shifting their communication and services provided to refugees and locals to a remote operation. Then, the research team adjusted the research goals and interview schedule, to include new questions pertaining to the impacts of COVID-19 on aid workers and their perspectives on the impacts on beneficiaries. The informed consent process was adjusted to contain remote interviewing, ethical considerations of recorded interviews, privacy and confidentiality [ 31 ].

During the preparations for the changes in the study, I had to adjust the training of the students to weekly remote meetings, in addition to including potential challenges related to remote interviews. These challenges included the clarity of interview recordings, scheduling interviews considering the time difference, internet dis-connectivity and flexibility required from the researchers. Flexibility in conducting the study required scheduling meetings according to participants’ convenience and language preferences—which have not always aligned with those of the researchers. Fluency and professional terms in Arabic were another concern that students needed my help in translating. Additionally, we always had to bear in mind that participants were at their homes with their families, children, accompanying background noises, and distractions. Furthermore, other challenges were raised pertaining to participants’ responses, which might be biased to solely focusing their discourse on the impacts of COVID-19, rather than a chronological comparison prior to the pandemic. Moreover, it was necessary to consider participants’ levels of stress and the general feelings of panic in the Middle East. All these research challenges as well as personal challenges increased the students’ anxiety and stress levels in conducting a study for the first time in their academic experience, as well as my own anxiety in mentoring them during these unpredicted circumstances.

As a Palestinian trauma researcher, it was important to me to support my students during these tumultuous times. Therefore, our weekly remote meetings would commence with the students sharing their personal experiences, state of mind and well-being and later on would proceed to the research-related challenges and practical decision making ( Figure 1 ).

Challenges of researchers in conducting international study during the eruption of COVID-19.

This process has proven to be effective and helpful in making the students feel safe, capable, encouraged and embraced. A useful and encouraging statement that I used during the meetings with my students and a reminder for myself when our work energies dropped, intimidated with doubt and a sense of vanity was: “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior” [ 27 ] (p. 32). I would recommend that mentors and supervisors at academic institutions provide their students and staff with such safe spaces to contain all the stressors conveyed, in order to enable productivity, growth and empowerment when conducting research in a Shared Traumatic Pandemic Reality.

5. Conclusions

COVID-19 has imposed many challenges on researchers in conducting an international study on refugees and aid workers’ circumstances in Lebanon. Such topics are rarely investigated and scarcely funded in academic studies, regardless of a pandemic. During the pandemic, many studies have utilized secondhand data found in internet resources due to the limited access to vulnerable populations in the field. However, our team has insisted on facing such challenges and conducted this firsthand study despite COVID-19 limitations and other obstacles faced in “normal” times. To conclude, we have set forth recommendations to the academic community and the humanitarian sector pertaining to conducting an international study and providing services to vulnerable populations in conflict affected zones during COVID-19, respectively, inspired by the holistic approach of humanistic psychology. Our recommendations hope to assist other researchers who undertake uncommon, underrepresented, and underfunded research journeys in times of disasters, beyond COVID-19. First, we recommend that researchers examine the Shared Traumatic Pandemic Reality as encompassing multiple impacts on both participants and researchers. During our study, quadrilateral impacts of COVID-19 were observed on four actors: refugees, aid workers, student researchers and a mentor. The pandemic has affected and changed the life and work circumstances of all mentioned actors, combining an additional layer of secondary traumatization to the already traumatizing work-related materials [ 21 ]. Second, conducting in-person data collection during a pandemic would place both participants and researchers at a potential risk of infection. Therefore, adjusting and compromising the study’s goals, design and methodology to address the new subjective conditions of all actors involved in the process are crucial protective measures. Flexibility and authentic communication are key requirements from researchers and mentors to overcome obstacles, such as adjustment of research questions and collaboration with agencies. Researchers need to take into consideration that the findings of their study might be dictated by participants’ personal experiences affected by a pandemic. These may encompass challenges and stressors, as well as new paths of making meaning, growth and development [ 43 ]. Third, even though COVID-19 disrupted the speedy processes and productivity of all professions [ 13 ], researchers may take advantage of remote studies, since they were found to be cost-effective [ 31 ]. Remote research spares the time of travel, accommodation, culture shock and academic institutional reimbursement procedures. Researchers may utilize the time productively in data analysis to be delivered to collaborative agencies in a faster manner. “The methodology should inherently be aimed at improving the situation for those affected by it” [ 44 ] (p. 716). Thus, productivity may assist agencies and policy makers in incorporating the research recommendations to the benefit of their beneficiaries and staff. Fourth, being exposed to the complex traumatic pandemic experience, which includes fear, panic, uncertainty, emptiness, economic instability and helplessness, may hold some solace as a shared global human experience [ 13 ]. However, at the same time, it may also hold a dehumanizing experience due to the forced quarantine, social distancing and isolation, which can be devastating if not addressed in humane policies. Therefore, we recommend addressing the basic needs of all actors, especially the physiological and safety needs, as well as the need for love and belonging [ 43 ]. By providing emotional support during COVID-19, not only to beneficiaries, the refugees in our study, but also to the aid workers who assist them, researchers involved in data collection and mentors who support their research teams may increase the sense of belongingness. Support groups and training on balancing work and work-from-home, remote work and parenting, and precautionary measures during work, are recommended in enhancing the sense of belonging, safety and productivity [ 45 ].

Additionally, refugees, aid workers and research teams may face similar challenges during COVID-19, manifested in new work stressors, threatened health, family dynamics, unemployment of family members and other economic obstacles [ 45 , 46 , 47 ]. Therefore, we also recommend addressing refugees, aid workers, and research teams’ basic needs in providing them with hygiene kits, food pantries or grocery bags, children’s school supplies and so on. Due to COVID-19′s economic impact and the high unemployment rate globally, we recommend continuing the cash assistance for refugees and paid salaries for aid workers and researchers, despite the changes in eligibility criteria, or working hours and productivity, respectively. These recommendations would require flexibility from donors in the terms and standards of the funds provided to academic institutions and relief agencies, so that they can adequately support, embolden capacities, enable a sense of dignity, security and stable functioning of their beneficiaries, staff and researchers.

COVID-19 impacted humanity globally, regardless of citizenship, culture, race, gender, ethnic group, sexual orientation, or any other affiliation, which resulted at times in feelings of despair, meaninglessness, loneliness and a violation of profound aspects of life, such as questioning the purpose in living [ 48 ]. Still the impacts of COVID-19 were disproportionately more taxing among sexual minorities, BIPOC and women in general in academia [ 45 ], underserved and marginalized populations belonging to a low socio-economic stratum [ 47 ], as well as minorities and refugee populations in the Middle East [ 21 , 22 ]. It is thus crucial to familiarize all actors with the term “monoanthropism” or shared humanity [ 27 ], to offer them some hope and strength, since they are not alone in the current situation, and to remind them that what they do is meaningful, under all circumstances, including at times of inevitable suffering and torment. Such a reminder will encourage them to make an opportunity out of a challenge and to gain resilience and growth in the face of adversity [ 48 ].

This study was an important opportunity to conduct research during unprecedented circumstances, but the recommendations outlined are not only limited to research conducted during COVID-19. The recommendations provided are based on adjusting to the complicated lives of humans and the considerations made will prove valuable to every research study conducted in less-than-ideal circumstances, especially during precarious times of global turmoil. Pandemics unfortunately are persistent and not easily demolished, with the worsening conditions of climate change, spreading of zoonotic diseases facilitated by global trade, as well as the increased displacement of diverse populations worldwide, making coping for professionals even more traumatizing and complex. Thus, it is essential to learn from our experience during COVID-19 in outlining what to expect in such circumstances and tailoring new policies, so that the academic community and humanitarian sector are better prepared when faced with future epidemics and other globally impacting situations.

Acknowledgments

We thank the Syrian and Lebanese aid workers for their participation and for sharing their personal and professional narratives, voices, and experiences, which have taught us many lessons on humanity, assisting others and coping with work trauma in Lebanon, especially during the quarantine and the eruption of COVID-19. We also thank all humanitarian organizations operating in Lebanon for their collaboration and for allowing us access to their staff and facilitating our remote encounters with them. These organizations are: Women Now for Development; Basmeh and Zeitooneh: Relief and Development; World Vision Lebanon; Akkarouna; SHEILD Lebanon; and Serepta. We would also like to thank Jamal Atamneh for connecting us with organizations operating in Lebanon that serve Syrian refugees and locals in need. In addition, we would like to thank Rayan Lotfi and Kei McHale for their editing suggestions to the manuscript.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, J.M., L.E. and N.R.; methodology, J.M., L.E. and N.R.; validation, J.M., L.E. and N.R.; formal analysis, J.M., L.E. and N.R.; investigation, J.M. and L.E.; resources, J.M. and N.R.; data curation, J.M. and L.E.; writing—original draft preparation, J.M., L.E. and N.R.; writing—review and editing, J.M., L.E. and N.R.; visualization, J.M. and L.E.; supervision, N.R.; project administration, N.R.; funding acquisition, J.M. and N.R. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

This research was partially funded by two research grants from the Sultan Program in Arab Studies of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley, granted to J.M. and N.R. In addition, publication made possible in part by support from the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) sponsored by the UC Berkeley Library.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Informed consent statement.

Only verbal informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study due to the limitations imposed by COVID-19 and the remote interviewing process.

Data Availability Statement

Conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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This web page provides guidance to researchers conducting international research and alerts investigators to the additional review requirements and considerations for such activities when the UW IRB is the IRB of record.

Questions and Answers

All human subjects research conducted by University of Washington faculty, staff, or students regardless of funding source or research location, requires prospective submission to the UW IRB or reliance on another domestic or commercial IRB for the engagement of the UW. UW does not rely on international IRBs.

Per HSD policy , for projects with an international component, UW IRB reviews all activities for the proposed research project, including those conducted at international sites, that the UW is engaged in. Additional review by a local “in country” IRB is usually required per local regulations. Local review boards may be referred to as an Institutional Review Board (IRB), an Independent Ethics Committee (IEC), an Ethical Review Board (ERB) or Research Ethics Board (REB). In other words, international projects generally have review by two or more IRBs.

In situations when the UW serves only as a passthrough of NIH funds for Fogarty Fellowships and there is NO other UW involvement, the UW will certify to the external funding agency that IRB approval has been (or is being) obtained, and from whom. If you have questions about this process, or want to request a certification letter, email [email protected] .

International sites are excluded from the Single IRB mandate . This means that international sites would not be required to rely on a Single IRB. If the UW IRB will be the IRB of record for all the domestic sites in a project, you should obtain IRB review of the international components as described in this guidance. If all of the domestic sites will be reviewed by a non-UW IRB, you should obtain IRB review of the international components as described in that non-UW IRB’s policies and procedures relating to international research.

What if my study is being reviewed by an external IRB (for example, Advarra)?

You should follow that IRB’s policies and procedures about the IRB review of international research.

The University of Washington IRB applies the U.S. “Common Rule” human subjects regulations (i.e., 45 CFR 46) to all projects, international and domestic, except as allowed by the HSD Flexibility Policy ( GUIDANCE Authority and Responsibilities of HSD and UW IRB ). Other U.S. regulations are applied as required (e.g., FDA, EPA, DoD). The IRB applies the same ethical and regulatory standards to international research as to domestic research as well as the same UW policies and procedures for the conduct of research. This is separate, and in addition to any regulatory or other reviews (e.g., local IRB, government agency) required at the location where research is conducted.

When research is conducted outside the United States, investigators must comply with both the U.S. regulations and with the local policies, permissions and regulations governing the international research site.

It can take time to identify and navigate the local requirements. If possible, enlist a local collaborator to help you address that site’s requirements and assist in identifying who to contact and what is required to obtain ethics reviews and permissions to conduct research at that international site.

Where can I locate information on foreign research regulations for the specific country where I plan to conduct research?

Investigators can begin to educate themselves about applicable foreign research regulations for a specific country with the resources below:

• International Compilation of Human Research Standards

Investigators are strongly encouraged to collaborate with an individual or organization with expertise in the region. This collaboration will greatly assist in identifying appropriate research sites, navigating the local regulations and policies, understanding culture, local infrastructure, overcoming language barriers and increasing community partnership.

Based on study location and risk level, the IRB may require documentation of a local site collaborator. This may be necessary to ensure the project meets the IRB approval criteria related to adequate resources and expertise, appropriate subject protections, and an adequate consent process.

There may be no local functioning review board. In these circumstances the UW IRB may require, depending upon study location and risk level, a letter of cooperation or permission from an appropriate local institutional or oversight official. This is sometimes called site permission or a letter of invitation . This letter would need to be written by an individual completely independent of your study who is highly familiar with the culture of the region where the research will be conducted. Required elements:

• Reference the title of the study displayed in the IRB application
• Describe the expertise of the individual preparing the letter to address the local cultural and social norms
• Confirm they understand the intent of the research and activities to be performed
• Confirm the planned study does not conflict with local and cultural norms
• Document is signed and dated

Are there special requirements if my study is funded by a U.S. government agency (example: NIH, CDC)?

If the research is funded by the U.S. government, then each foreign institution that is engaged in the research must hold and/or obtain a valid Federal Wide Assurance (FWA) with OHRP and these institutions must review and conduct research in compliance with the applicable U.S. federal regulations. The UW investigator is responsible for ensuring that all engaged international sites hold an FWA and that the research is approved by an IRB or Ethics Committee.

These are common examples of when an institution is “engaged” in human research:

• Institutions whose employees or agents obtain the informed consent of human subjects for the research.
• Institutions whose employees or agents obtain for research purposes identifiable private information of identifiable biological specimens from any source for the research (even if the institution’s employees or agents do not directly interact or intervene with human subjects).
• Institutions whose employees or agents intervene for research purposes with any human subjects of the research by performing invasive or noninvasive procedures , or by manipulating the subject’s environment .

Information on FWAs can be found at OHRP’s Register IRBs & Obtain FWAs page.

Issues of engagement, FWAs, and local site requirements can be complex. Please contact [email protected] if you have specific questions or concerns.

What are the UW IRB’s requirements for translated and/or interpreted information and documents for enrolling non-English speaking participants?

Researchers must have a plan to manage communications with non-English-speaking participants during all phases of study participation. Because participants may have questions or concerns at any time, investigators must be prepared to manage communication beyond the consent process and data collection.

Review the section on  Anticipated involvement of subjects with limited English proficiency in HSD’s Consent guidance for full details.

What additional information must I provide in my IRB application if I want to pay or give a gift to participants in foreign countries?

Researchers should first find out whether the laws and regulations of the foreign country permit research participants to receive gifts or monetary compensation for research participation. If yes, researchers must describe in their UW IRB application the planned amount of compensation in both UW and foreign currency. To prevent undue influence from inappropriately high levels of compensation, as well as inappropriately low levels of compensation, information about the average daily wage in the country must also be provided. For more information, review HSD’s guidance on Subject Payment .

“Local context” means information about the local regulations, policies, relevant cultural norms, and relevant local cultural/religious/social sensitivities. The UW IRB must be provided with sufficient knowledge about the local research context to ensure that adequate protections are in place and ethical research conduct occurs in that geographic location. Local context information is provided to the IRB in the IRB Protocol form .

• Research Sites . Identify all countries where the research will be conducted.
• Cultural Context . Describe site-specific cultural issues, customs, beliefs, sensitivities, or values that may affect the research, how it is conducted, or how consent is obtained or documented.
• Specimens – for example, some countries will not allow biospecimens to be taken out of the country.
• Age of consent – laws about when an individual is considered old enough to be able to provide consent vary from country to country.
• Legally authorized representative – laws about who can serve as a legally authorized representatives (and who has priority when more than one person is available) vary between countries.
• Mandatory reporting – some countries have laws requiring reporting of specific conditions or behaviors (for example, child abuse or serious criminal behaviors) to local authorities.
• Language and Literacy . The IRB reviews the process that will be used to ensure that: (1) the oral and written information provided to participants during the consent process and throughout the study will be in a language readily understandable to them; and (2) at an appropriate reading/comprehension level for written materials (e.g., consent forms, questionnaires). More information can be found at the section on Subjects With Limited English Proficiency in HSD’s consent guidance.
• Subject payment . How your planned payments or gifts to subjects compare with the local economic situation and average wage.

Researchers are strongly encouraged to collaborate with an individual or organization with expertise in this topic.

Some countries place restrictions on bringing identifiable data into/out of the country. The European Union, for example, has laws surrounding what kind of identifiable information can be provided by participants in Europe and brought to the United States. Data export laws and U.S. export control laws [ https://www.washington.edu/research/myresearch-lifecycle/setup/compliance-requirements-non-financial/export-control-measures/ ] may also affect your research in countries with which the U.S. has embargoes or trade restrictions, such as Iran. These laws may also affect which technology you can bring into the country.

U.S. federal Certificates of Confidentiality will be issued to researchers for applicable research regardless of the country where the investigator or the protected information resides. However, Certificates of Confidentiality may not be effective for data held in foreign countries. Review the guidance on Certificate of Confidentiality for more information and the UW Consent templates for appropriate consent form language.

All revisions or modifications to an approved study must be reviewed and approved by all reviewing IRBs prior to implementing the change(s), regardless of the location of research. Changes that are required by local IRBs or communities must be submitted to the UW IRB prior to implementing the changes.

The only exception is for changes or actions that are “necessary to eliminate apparent immediate hazards to the subject”. If this does happen, regulations require you to report the actions taken to the IRB within 10 working days ( Guide to Reporting New Information ).

While the personal safety of UW employees and students conducting research outside the United States is not the responsibility of the IRB, there are relevant resources available on campus that can be helpful for other institutional requirements. For example, if students will conduct research in other countries, they must register with the UW Office of Global Affairs.

A UW Travel Waiver may be required for travel to certain countries: list of countries .

What if I have questions?

Contact HSD Info [email protected] if you have questions about preparing your IRB application or about conducting International Research.

APPLICATION IRB Protocol GLOSSARY Engagement GUIDANCE Authority and Responsibilities of HSD and UW IRB GUIDANCE Certificate of Confidentiality GUIDANCE Consent GUIDANCE Subject Payment UW Consent Templates WEBPAGE Guide to Reporting New Information WEBPAGE Single IRB

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IRB Considerations for International Research

UPDATED February 1, 2023

NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy Update: Learn more here . TRAINING UPDATE: Effective October 1, 2022, all Cornell study personnel involved in Exempt research protocols are now required to complete CITI training in human participant research ethics. See details here . For more information about Cornell IRB training requirements, visit the IRB Training webpage .

Research with human participants in other countries must comply with both U.S. and international ethical standards, and may require additional consideration for international participants' rights and welfare within different cultural contexts and local regulations.

Research conducted by Cornell faculty, students and staff in foreign countries must be reviewed and approved by the Cornell IRB. In addition to Cornell IRB approval, some international research must also be approved by the local equivalent of an IRB. Where there is no equivalent board or committee, researchers should work with local NGOs, researchers or community leaders to ensure that the project is consistent with cultural and legal expectations, and to secure support for the conduct of the research. As part of its review, the Cornell IRB will require a letter demonstrating support from an appropriate local body, organization or individual who will cooperate with and support the researcher. Researchers are urged to plan for the additional time that will be needed to obtain and document local support and review, and for the Cornell IRB to then review these important documents. Please see IRB Policy: International Human Research for more information.

Both the U.S. and host country standards for protecting human participants must be respected through the IRB review and approval process and the conduct of the research. Where the two sets of standards present a conflict, the research must meet the higher standard. In particular, while we do not impose our standards for written documentation on other cultures, we do not relax our standards for ethical conduct of research or for a meaningful consent and/or assent process, including ensuring additional protections for vulnerable participant populations (e.g., children, prisoners).

Due to U.S. export regulations, Cornell researchers cannot send money or provide other transactions of value (e.g., gift cards, presents) to study participants in any of these locations: Cuba, certain regions of Ukraine, Iran, North Korea, and Syria.

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Cross-national studies constitute the bulk of Pew Research Center’s international survey research. Such studies pose special challenges when it comes to ensuring the comparability of data across multiple languages, cultures and contexts. To learn more about the challenges and best practices of polling in foreign countries and in multiple languages, see here.

Pew Research Center staff are responsible for the overall design and execution of each cross-national survey project, including topical focus, questionnaire development, countries to be surveyed and sample design. The Center’s staff frequently contract with a coordinating vendor to identify local, reputable research organizations, which are hired to collaborate on all aspects of sample and questionnaire design, survey administration and data processing. Both coordinating vendors and local research organizations are consulted on matters of sampling, fieldwork logistics, data quality and weighting. In addition, Pew Research Center often seeks the advice of subject matter experts and experienced survey researchers regarding the design and content of its cross-national studies.

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Pew Research Center’s cross-national studies are designed to be nationally representative using probability-based methods and target the non-institutional adult population (18 and older) in each country. The Center strives for samples that cover as much of the adult population as possible, given logistical, security and other constraints. Coverage limitations are noted in the detailed methods for each country.

Sample sizes for Pew Research Center’s cross-national studies are usually designed to yield at least 1,000 interviews, though larger samples may be required for more robust within-country comparisons. Reported margins of error account for design effects due to clustering, stratification and weighting.

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Pew Research Center is a charter member of the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) Transparency Initiative .

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International Research

Introduction.

When conducting international research, additional review and documentation are required from both the international site and the Pitt IRB. It is imperative that you start the process early and request a consultation with the IRB staff during the initial planning stages. 

HRP consultation can be requested at  [email protected]

When is IRB review required?

All human subjects research conducted by UPMC and/or University of Pittsburgh faculty, staff, or students, regardless of funding source or the  location  at which the research will be conducted, requires submission to the Pitt IRB.

What training is required to conduct international research?

Prior to conducting international research, all study team members must complete the CITI International Research course . This course is comprised of two modules: International Research-SBE and Consent and Cultural Competence.

How far in advance should I submit my international application to the Pitt IRB?

Minimal Risk  applications should be submitted to the Pitt IRB a minimum of 2 months prior to Investigator approval deadlines. Submission 3 months prior is highly encouraged.

For  Greater Than Minimal Risk  applications the location and topic of the research may require the Pitt IRB to employ a foreign consultant with the appropriate expertise to assist in the ethical review. Locating and enlisting the assistance of consultants may make the review process take significantly longer.

Do not make specific travel plans or purchase plane tickets until you have received all foreign and domestic approvals. There is no guarantee of IRB approval by a given deadline.

What additional regulatory reviews are needed?

When research is conducted outside the United States, investigators must comply both with the U.S. regulations and with the local policies and regulations governing the international research sites. This is true whether the researchers are traveling to the foreign location or conducting their research remotely.  Local policies and regulations are often governed by an ethics committee, which is a committee that has been formally designated to approve, monitor, and review biomedical and behavioral research involving humans. This ethics committee may also be referred to as an Institutional Review Board (IRB), an Independent Ethics Committee (IEC), an Ethical Review Board (ERB), or Research Ethics Board (REB).

It is important to do your homework early and, whenever possible, enlist a local collaborator to help you address that site’s requirements and assist in identifying who to contact and what is required to obtain ethics reviews and permissions to conduct research at that international site. All documentation, including ethics reviews, site permissions, and memos of cultural appropriateness, must be uploaded in English.

Single IRB (Reliance) cannot be used for international sites. Even if the research would usually require a single IRB, each country must have its own approval or determination that oversight is not required.

Where can I locate information on foreign research regulations for the specific country where I plan to conduct research?

Investigators can begin to educate themselves about applicable foreign research regulations, by specific country, using the resources below:

• Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP) “International Compilation of Human Research Standards”
• Harvard School of Public Health Research Ethics Guidelines International Online Navigation Map (REGION)

There is a high level of variability in the procedural details across international research regulations. However, the majority of foreign regulations are based upon the foundational ethical guidelines provided within the International Conference of Harmonization (ICH) and the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS).

• International Conference of Harmonization (ICH)
• Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) (PDF)

What is required for Minimal Risk studies?

Depending on the international site, local ethics committee review may or may not be required. If it is required, it should be uploaded in the Supporting Documentation section. If it is not required, the PI must provide documentation to that effect.

One of the following should be uploaded as Supporting Documentation:

1. A Letter of approval from an Ethics Committee.

Required elements:

• Reference the title of the study displayed in the IRB application
• Clearly state the planned research was reviewed and approved
• Document is dated
• Provided on the official letterhead of the signatory

2. Documentation that the local regulations do not require a local ethics review

• Providing direct references to the local regulations that state ethics review is not required;  or
• Acknowledgement of Unregulated Research Activities (PDF) letter confirming that local ethics review is not required
• Clearly state the planned research does not require local regulatory oversight
• Confirm the Regulatory Official understands the intent of the research and activities to be performed

If local ethics review is not required then the IRB may request a memo of cultural appropriateness. The Memo of Cultural Appropriateness (PDF) should be authored by an individual completely independent of the study who is highly knowledgeable about the culture in the region where the research will be conducted. This document must be specific to the proposed research. Blanket statements about research within a particular country or culture are not sufficient. Required elements:

• Describe the expertise of the individual preparing the letter to address the local cultural and social norms
• Confirm they understand the intent of the research and activities to be performed
• Confirm the planned study does not conflict with local and cultural norms

If the culture of the research location is suitably similar to the United States, this requirement may be waived if the PI provides what the IRB deems to be sufficient reasoning.

What is required for Greater than Minimal Risk studies?

Studies that are designated as greater than minimal risk  require  a formal ethics review within the country where the research will be conducted.  Not all countries have an ethics review committee and the oversight may be addressed by the Department of Ministries or other governmental entities. 

A Letter of Approval from an Ethics Committee, required elements:

When are site permissions required?

When research is conducted at any site other than UPMC or Pitt facilities, an authorized individual from the proposed research site must provide written permission that the research can be conducted. This requirement may be waived if the local ethics approval affords access to the site, if research will be conducted in a truly public location, or if the research is conducted remotely. 

If site permission is required, you must upload to following question #6 for each site after selecting “International or Culturally Different” on Research Sites page.

A   Site permission letter (PDF)  from authorized individual. 

• Confirm the authorized individual understands the intent of the research and activities to be performed
• Must include a statement permitting the research to be conducted at that site
• The document is signed and dated

Do I need a local collaborator?

Investigators are  strongly  encouraged to collaborate with an individual or organization with expertise in the region. Based upon study location and risk level, the IRB may  require  a local site collaborator.

What are the additional requirements for enrolling non-English speaking participants?

The initial Pitt IRB submission should  only  include the English version of documents that will be used with research subjects, (recruitment materials, consent documents, data collection materials, etc.). Once the materials are approved both by the Pitt IRB and foreign Ethics Committee, the approved documents should be translated and submitted as a Modification including the final translated documents, back translations (if required) and a signed translator certification form. The documents may not be used until this Modification is approved.

For more detailed guidance, please see  Non-English Speaking Participants .

What additional information must I provide in my IRB application if I want to compensate participants in foreign countries?

If the laws and regulations of the foreign country permit research participants to receive monetary compensation for their time, the PittPRO application (Recruitment Methods #4) must describe the planned amount of compensation in both US and foreign currency.  For studies that do not require local ethics approval, the compensation must be placed in the context of average daily wage and/or purchasing power.

Note: The University has additional policies and procedures, not overseen by the IRB, dictating how participant payments in foreign countries are implemented. For more information on the topic of compensation outside of the U.S. visit the  University of Pittsburgh Global Operations website .

Can I submit to the Pitt IRB before I have ethics approval from my international site?

You are permitted to submit to the Pitt IRB before foreign ethics approval is granted. In these cases, the Pitt IRB approval letter will be contingent and will state no research activities may begin until a Modification providing documentation of foreign ethics approval is submitted to and approved by the Pitt IRB.

How can I locate a Foreign Ethics Committee to provide review and approval of my study?

Research studies supported by U.S. Federal funds are required to undergo foreign IRB review by an Ethics committee that holds a Federal Wide Assurance (FWA). Investigators of U.S. Federally funded research studies can search the OHRP “ Database for Registered IORGs and IRBs, Approved FWAs and for Documents Received by OHRP in the Last 60 days ” to locate foreign IRBs that hold an FWA:

• Choose the "FWAs" tab
• Press the “Advanced Search” link
• Select the appropriate country & Search

Non-federally funded studies can use this same search to locate and contact a foreign ethics committee/IRB.

Summary of Required Documents by Review Type

Additional University Policies Related to Conducting University Business Outside of the U.S.

When affiliates of the University of Pittsburgh are engaged in international projects there are additional University Policies and procedures that must be followed. For a summary of all University policies relating to international projects, please visit  University of Pittsburgh Global Operations .

There are additional University Policies and procedures when materials and/or data enter or leave the country. There are also additional considerations when research is conducted in embargoed or sanctioned countries. For further information, please visit the Office of Trade Compliance .

What information must I provide in my IRB application regarding the local site and culture?

It is imperative that investigators be fully informed about the local site and cultural context before submitting to the Pitt IRB. Select “International or Culturally Different Sites” in item 1 of Research Sites. This will prompt a series of questions about the research site, as well as a place to upload documentation, including memos of cultural appropriateness and local ethics committee approval. If non-English documents have been approved by the local ethics committee, they may be uploaded at the time of initial submission.

v. 8/14/2023

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OU Researcher’s Study on the Transnational Policy Process Receives Top Honors

Lorene Roberson

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Lorene Roberson (405) 325-2384 [email protected]

NORMAN, OKLA. – A study co-authored by Michelle Morais, Ph.D., an associate professor in the David L. Boren College of International Studies at the University of Oklahoma, has been awarded the best article of 2023 by the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice . The article explores the international diffusion and evolution of two public policies: conditional cash transfers and participatory budgeting.

Morais, in collaboration with Osmany Porto de Oliveira, Ph.D., from the Universidade Federal de São Paulo, conducted an in-depth comparative analysis of the policies, both of which originated in Brazil during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The article, titled “Incorporating Time into Policy Transfer Studies: A Comparative Analysis of the Transnational Policy Process of Conditional Cash Transfers and Participatory Budgeting,” introduces the concept of the “transnational policy process.”

Conditional cash transfer programs, implemented in over 40 countries according to Morais, aim to alleviate poverty by linking welfare benefits to recipients’ actions, such as ensuring school attendance for children or regular medical check-ups. Participatory budgeting empowers citizens to participate directly in the democratic process of allocating portions of public budgets, allowing them to prioritize and make decisions on public spending projects.

“This field has traditionally focused on single case studies, examining specific policies transferred from one location to another, whether within a single country or across borders. While these studies have been invaluable in tracing the trajectories of policy transfers and identifying why some policies succeed while others do not, our work emphasizes the importance of examining policies transferred multiple times across various locations over an extended period,” Morais said.

Morais notes that conditional cash transfers and participatory budgeting provide unique opportunities to trace their evolution over time, offering insights that short-term policy studies cannot capture.

The article marks a significant step toward creating a comprehensive understanding of the transnational policy process.

“Existing public policy theories predominantly focus on domestic factors influencing public policy. Our research repeatedly shows the critical role of transnational elements in shaping public policy across various countries,” Morais said.

Morais serves as the co-director of the  Center for Brazil Studies  at OU.

The journal granted free access to the article.  Read the full study.

About the University of Oklahoma

Founded in 1890, the University of Oklahoma is a public research university located in Norman, Oklahoma. As the state’s flagship university, OU serves the educational, cultural, economic and health care needs of the state, region and nation. OU was named the state’s highest-ranking university in  U.S. News & World Report’s  most recent Best Colleges list .  For more information about the university, visit  ou.edu .

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Two ou researchers receive aauw fellowships.

Annabel Ipsen, an assistant professor of sociology, and Evelyn Cox, a doctoral student in the School of Library and Information Studies and research project manager at OU’s Native Nations Center, have been awarded 2024-2025 American Fellowships from the American Association of University Women.

A study co-authored by Michelle Morais, Ph.D., an associate professor in the David L. Boren College of International Studies at the University of Oklahoma, has been awarded the best article of 2023 by the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice.

OU Student Receives 2024 Udall Scholarship

Anna Hyslop, an Economics and Global Energy, Environment and Resources student, was recently named a 2024 Udall Scholar. She is one of 55 recipients nationwide for the prestigious undergraduate scholarship.

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International study reveals surprising twist in how diabetes drugs help the heart

A randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial led by a collaboration between Duke-NUS Medical School, National Heart Center Singapore (NHCS) and Klinikum Nürnberg, Germany, has revealed surprising new insights into how SGLT2 inhibitor drugs, originally developed for diabetes, benefit patients with heart failure.

Contrary to common assumptions, these drugs may improve cardiac outcomes and heart health without acting as diuretics.

Heart failure is a condition where the heart cannot pump enough blood to meet the body's demands, often leading to fluid build-up in tissues and congestion of the blood circulation. This congestion strains the heart and causes symptoms like breathlessness and swelling.

Reducing congestion is key to managing heart failure, as it reduces the workload of the heart and thereby eases pumping.

SGLT2 inhibitor drugs are the new blockbuster treatment for chronic heart failure because they very quickly stabilize heart function and reduce hospitalizations and patient deaths. The drugs release more glucose into the urine, and thereby have the potential to pull more fluid from the body into the urine, alleviating the congestion experienced by patients with heart disease.

Given this diuretic potential, leaflets accompanying the drugs list dehydration as a common side effect of their use.

However, results from this clinical trial, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology , cast doubt on the presumed diuretic action of SGLT2 inhibitors in patients with heart failure.

First author Dr. Adriana Marton, visiting senior research fellow with the Cardiovascular & Metabolic Disorders Program at Duke-NUS, who kicked-off this pilot study in Singapore, said, "Many experts who relied on the idea that SGLT2 inhibitors act as diuretic drugs raised their eyebrows when we first reported our data, showing that the body instead activates a very elegant defense mechanism that almost entirely abolishes the potential diuretic effects of these drugs."

Conducted together with NHCS in Singapore, the double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial, the gold standard of clinical trials, examined the SGLT2 inhibitor dapagliflozin in patients with chronic heart failure.

As expected, the drug sharply increased urine glucose excretion. This increased concentration of glucose in urine creates an osmotic imbalance that should cause more water to be pulled into the urine and therefore increase urine volume.

But that's not what happened. Instead, the body responded by releasing more vasopressin, a brain hormone that instructs the kidneys to conserve water. This minimized any rise in urine volume and even after 24 hours, patients' urine volume remained stable despite persistent glucose excretion from dapagliflozin.

These results, which are the first to be published from this international collaborative project, contradict the prevailing theory that SGLT2 inhibitors reduce congestion through diuresis or increased urine production.

Senior author Associate Professor Jens Titze from the Cardiovascular & Metabolic Disorders Program at Duke-NUS, explained that the brain quickly compensates for potential dehydration caused by these drugs, suggesting that their benefit to patients with heart failure might be through mechanisms other than reducing fluid overload.

"It seems that the brain's internal hydration meter very quickly detects reduced hydration levels, and then forces the kidneys to further concentrate the urine to prevent body water loss. This suggests that we need to rethink our assumptions of how SGLT2 inhibitors benefit patients with heart failure, since decongestion by increased urine production doesn't seem to be the answer," said Titze.

Associate Professor David Sim, head and senior consultant from the Department of Cardiology at NHCS and a senior co-author of the study, said, "As a cardiologist caring for many patients with heart failure, I am excited by the fresh perspective this study brings and the wider benefits these drugs may confer.

"We need robust research like this to stimulate new thinking on how to optimally treat heart failure—and ideally to prevent the disease even before it occurs. Our ultimate goal is to translate these insights into better outcomes for our patients, and to support Singaporeans in living long and healthy lives without heart disease."

New non-invasive tools ready to support next phase of this research collaboration

While these drugs clearly benefit patients with heart failure or chronic kidney disease, the mechanisms responsible for these beneficial effects are still unclear. One theory is that the process of energy and water conservation induced by these drugs induces metabolic changes in the body that improve organ function.

"We think that the initial glucose and water loss caused by the SGLT2 inhibitors triggers some ancient and highly conserved evolutionary body survival signals that flip metabolic switches to improve heart and kidney function," said Titze.

"Imagine walking in the desert on limited food and water. Your body would adapt by slowing non-essential processes to conserve resources, and invest energy only in the processes you really need. We hypothesize that SGLT2 inhibitors trigger similar survival pathways that re-program cell metabolism."

In parallel to the clinical trial in Singapore, the team's collaborators in Germany have developed methods that are now available to detect activation of these ancient metabolic pathways in patients' urine.

The team will use these to uncover the actual mechanisms behind these drugs' organ-protective benefits and investigate how these changes may improve the healthspan not just of patients with heart failure but also with kidney disease, diabetes or living with other aging-related ailments.

"We are very excited because we finally have treatment options that will improve the outcomes for these chronically ill patients, but there clearly is much more to learn about how these drugs protect the kidneys and the heart, and improve longevity, " explained Dr. Marton.

Martin is also a consultant nephrologist and clinical investigator at Klinikum Nürnberg and its medical university, Paracelsus Medizinische Privatuniversität (PMU), where she is currently conducting a follow-up clinical trial in patients with chronic kidney disease.

More information: Adriana Marton et al, Water Conservation Overrides Osmotic Diuresis During SGLT2 Inhibition in Patients With Heart Failure, Journal of the American College of Cardiology (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.jacc.2024.02.020

Provided by Duke-NUS Medical School

Researchers have located the brain network responsible for stuttering

An international research group led by researchers from the University of Turku and Turku University Hospital in Finland has succeeded in identifying the probable origin of stuttering in the brain.

Stuttering is a speech rhythm disorder characterised by involuntary repetitions, prolongations or pauses in speech that prevent typical speech production. Approximately 5–10% of young children stutter, and an estimated 1% continue to stutter into adulthood. A severe stutter can have a profound negative impact on the life of the individual affected.

“Stuttering was once considered a psychological disorder. However, with further research, it is now understood to be a brain disorder related to the regulation of speech production,” says Professor of Neurology Juho Joutsa  from the University of Turku.

Stuttering may also be acquired as a result of certain neurological diseases, such as Parkinson's disease or a stroke. However, the neurobiological mechanisms of stuttering are not yet fully understood, and where it originates in the brain remains uncertain. The findings from brain imaging studies are partly contradictory, and it is challenging to determine which changes are the root cause of stuttering and which are merely associated phenomena.

Stuttering localised in the same brain network regardless of its cause

Researchers from Finland, New Zealand, the United States and Canada developed a new research design that could provide a solution to this problem. The study included individuals who had suffered a stroke, some of whom developed a stutter immediately after it. The researchers discovered that although the strokes were located in different parts of the brain, they all localised to the same brain network, unlike the strokes that did not cause stuttering.

In addition to people who had suffered a stroke, the researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of 20 individuals with developmental stuttering. In these individuals, the stuttering was associated with structural changes in the nodes of the brain network originally identified in relation to causal stroke lesions – the greater the changes, the more severe the stuttering. This finding suggests that stuttering is caused by a common brain network, regardless of the aetiology (developmental or neurological).

The key nodes of the network identified by the researchers were putamen, amygdala and claustrum located deep within the brain, and the connections between them.

Red: the central nodes of the brain network identified based on stroke lesions causing stuttering Blue: structural changes correlated with the severity of persistent developmental stuttering ASt=amygdalostrital transition zone. Pu=Putamen. Cl=Claustrum.

"These findings explain well-known features of stuttering, such as the motor difficulties in speech production and the significant variability in stuttering severity across emotional states. As major nuclei in the brain, the putamen regulates motor function and the amygdala regulates emotions. The claustrum, in turn, acts as a node for several brain networks and relays information between them,” explains Joutsa.

The results of the study provide a unique insight into the neurobiological basis of stuttering. Locating stuttering in the brain opens up new possibilities for medical treatment. Researchers hope that in the future, stuttering could be effectively treated, for example, with brain stimulation that can be targeted specifically to the now identified brain network.

The research results were published in the prestigious journal Brain on 27 May 2024.

More information:

Professor of Neurology, MD/PhD, Juho Joutsa, [email protected]

Associate Professor Catherine Theys, PhD,  [email protected]

Images: Unsplash Brain, awae059 / Clinical Neurosciences, University of Turku 

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When we’re happy, we smile. The corners of our mouths move out and up, our cheeks lift, and the skin around our eyes crinkles. But does it work the other way? Can posing our muscles in a smile brighten our mood?

According to an international collaboration of researchers, posing a smile can brighten our mood. (Image credit: Getty Images)

This question has been part of a long-standing debate among psychology researchers about whether facial expressions influence our emotional experience, an idea known as the facial feedback hypothesis. In a recent paper published in Nature Human Behavior , an international collaboration of researchers led by Stanford research scientist Nicholas Coles found strong evidence that posed smiles can, in fact, make us happier.

The effect isn’t strong enough to overcome something like depression, said Coles, but it provides useful insight into what emotions are and where they come from.

“We experience emotion so often that we forget to marvel at just how incredible this ability is. But without emotion, there’s no pain or pleasure, no suffering or bliss, and no tragedy and glory in the human condition,” he added. “This research tells us something fundamentally important about how this emotional experience works.”

Psychologists still aren’t sure about the origins of this central part of the human condition. One theory is that our conscious experience of emotions is based off sensations in the body – the idea that the feeling of a rapid heartbeat provides some of the sensation we describe as fear, for example. Facial feedback has often been cited as evidence for this theory, but some recent experiments have called it into question.

Before completing this project, Coles considered himself a fence-sitter on the issue. There had been seminal facial feedback research suggesting that participants found Gary Larson’s The Far Side comics funnier when they held a pen or pencil in their teeth without letting their lips touch it (supposedly activating the same muscles as a smile). But in 2016, 17 different labs tried and failed to replicate these results, casting the hypothesis into doubt.

When Coles conducted a meta-analysis of previous studies on the subject in 2019, which included a variety of different methods, his results seemed to indicate there was at least some evidence supporting facial feedback. So he decided to try to settle the matter in a way that would convince both skeptics and believers. He organized the Many Smiles Collaboration, a group that included people on both sides of the issue as well as fence-sitters like Coles, and together they devised a methodology that everyone was satisfied with.

“Rather than quibble and debate over Twitter and through journal articles, which would take decades and probably not be that productive, we said, ‘Let’s just come together and design something that would please both sides,’ ” Coles said. “Let’s figure out a way that we could potentially convince proponents that the effect isn’t real, and potentially convince critics that the effect is real.”

The researchers created a plan that included three well-known techniques intended to encourage participants to activate their smile muscles. One-third of participants were directed to use the pen-in-mouth method, one-third were asked to mimic the facial expressions seen in photos of smiling actors, and the final third were given instructions to move the corners of their lips toward their ears and lift their cheeks using only the muscles in their face.

In each group, half the participants performed the task while looking at cheerful images of puppies, kittens, flowers, and fireworks, and the other half simply saw a blank screen. They also saw these same types of images (or lack thereof) while directed to use a neutral facial expression.

In order to disguise the goal of the trial, the researchers mixed in several other small physical tasks and asked participants to solve simple math problems. After each task, participants rated how happy they were feeling.

The Many Smiles Collaboration collected data from 3,878 participants from 19 countries. After analyzing their data, the researchers found a noticeable increase in happiness from participants mimicking smiling photographs or pulling their mouth toward their ears. But much like the 2016 group, they didn’t find a strong mood change in participants using the pen-in-mouth technique.

“The effect wasn’t as reliable with the pen-in-mouth condition,” Coles said. “We’re not sure why. Going into the study, we assumed that all three techniques created the correct muscular configuration for an expression of happiness. But we found some evidence that the pen-in-mouth condition may not be actually creating an expression that closely resembles smiling.”

For instance, the act of holding the pen may require some amount of teeth-clenching that isn’t usually present in a genuine smile, which could be a confounding factor. Nonetheless, the evidence from the other two techniques is clear and provides a compelling argument that human emotions are somehow linked to muscle movements or other physical sensations.

“The stretch of a smile can make people feel happy and the furrowed brow can make people feel angry; thus, the conscious experience of emotion must be at least partially based on bodily sensations,” Coles said. “Over the past few years, the science took one step back and a few steps forward. But now we’re closer than ever to understanding a fundamental part of the human condition: emotion.”

Coles is a research scientist at Stanford University, the co-director of the Stanford Big Team Science Lab , and the director of the Psychological Science Accelerator . He conducts research on emotion, cross-cultural psychology, and models of scientific collaboration.

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• A-Bomb for the People? When Leaders Cue the Public in Nuclear Decision-Making
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In building indigenous nuclear weapon programs, leaders have incentives to keep their plans secret, and several have. Domestic populations may limit the flexibility of the program, and international scrutiny could lead to sanctions or even military strikes. And yet, many leaders have cued the public to their nuclear ambitions. Why do leaders cue these audiences to their nuclear intentions when doing so could lead to both internal and external constraints from public awareness and foreign pressure? Using qualitative evidence from past cases of elite cueing, this article offers a theoretical examination of why some leaders choose to involve the public despite—or sometimes because of—the constraints that attention can impose. We describe six types of cueing logics based on the level of development of the nuclear program and the intended audience. Understanding the rationales behind such cues is not just of historical significance; these cues remain relevant as several states continue to pursue nuclear technologies—capabilities that can be used for peaceful purposes or repurposed for nuclear weapons. In other words, nuclear cueing is an important and overlooked aspect of research on nuclear proliferation.

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The HPV vaccine prevents head and neck cancers in men, study suggests

The HPV vaccine is linked to a drastic reduction in head and neck cancers in adolescent boys and men, new research finds. 

HPV, or human papillomavirus, is a sexually transmitted infection responsible for virtually all cases of cervical cancer . But the virus is also linked to a number of other cancers , including penile, anal and vaginal cancers. 

It also accounts for the majority — up to 70% — of head and neck cancers , which affect the throat and mouth. Men are about twice as likely to develop these cancers than women, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The HPV vaccine, initially approved for adolescent girls, protects against strains of the virus linked to cervical cancer and has been found to significantly reduce rates of the cancer . But there’s growing evidence that the vaccine also protects against other HPV-related cancers.

“We want males to be thinking about HPV vaccination not just as something that protects female patients, but also male patients,” said Jefferson DeKloe, a research fellow in the department of otolaryngology at Thomas Jefferson University, who specializes in head and neck surgery and who co-authored the research.

The findings will be presented next week at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference and have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. 

Prior research showed a downward trend in oral infections with HPV strains known to cause cancer. That was a promising sign, said Dr. Glenn J. Hanna, a medical oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Center for Head and Neck Oncology, who was not involved in the new research.

“If we can lower the infection rate, we would hope that we would see what we are seeing now, a decline in cancer rates,” Hanna said. “This is an important evolution of the story.” 

The new study analyzed health records from a national database that included nearly 3.5 million people in the United States ages 9 to 39 who had received any vaccination — HPV or otherwise — from 2010 through 2023. About 1.5 million were male, half of whom had been vaccinated against cancer-causing strains of HPV. Nearly 1 million were females who had been vaccinated against HPV. 

The researchers compared the rates of HPV-linked cancers — including head and neck, anal, penile, and cervical cancers — in people who had received the HPV vaccine to those who hadn’t. They found being vaccinated reduced the overall risk of HPV-related cancers in males by 54%, a decrease driven primarily by a drop in head and neck cancers. Females were about 30% less likely to develop any type of HPV-related cancer, including cervical cancer. 

Most cases of head and neck cancer are in people older than 50. Since the U.S. is only about a decade into widespread HPV vaccination in both males and females, the vaccinated generation hasn’t reached this age yet. HPV typically infects younger people and takes decades for chronic infection to lead to cancer.

“These are the early results of a larger phenomenon we are going to watch play out over the next 20 or 30 years,” DeKloe said, noting that experts don’t expect to see the full effect HPV vaccination has on cancer rates until the largely vaccinated generation is older. 

A second study, which will also be presented at the ASCO conference next week and is not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, found that HPV vaccination rates have been on the rise in the U.S. from 2011 through early 2020, including in all racial and ethnic groups.

HPV vaccination wasn’t recommended for males until 2011, five years after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the vaccine series for girls. The HPV vaccine is now recommended for all adolescents starting as young as age 9, but can also be given to adults up to age 45. 

In the new study, which included children and young adults ages 9 to 26, the increase was largely driven by growing HPV vaccine uptake among males. Although overall HPV vaccination rates among males still lag behind females — about 36% compared to about 50% of those in the 9 to 26 age group — these rates are accelerating. 

“The gap is narrowing between males and females and eventually I would hope that they would meet up,” said Dr. Danh Nguyen, a resident physician at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who led the research. 

Although vaccination efforts have focused on adolescents, adults should also consider getting vaccinated if they weren’t when they were younger, said Dr. Nancy Lee, service chief of head and neck radiation oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, who was not involved with either study. 

“If you are in your 20s or 30s, you can still get the vaccination. Even if you are 45, there is no reason you cannot get vaccinated because we have a population that lives a long time,” Lee said. 

Nguyen said it’s important that conversations about HPV vaccination continue to focus on the prevention of all cancers, including head and neck cancers that are more prevalent in men, rather than solely on cervical cancer prevention.

Hanna said stigma around HPV being a sexually transmitted infection has made discussions around vaccinating adolescents a sticky subject in the past, but that clear data showing the impact vaccination rates have on HPV-related cancers is shifting the narrative. 

“HPV vaccination is cancer prevention,” Hanna said. “The bottom line is that we are preventing cancers broadly by getting people vaccinated younger.”

Kaitlin Sullivan is a contributor for NBCNews.com who has worked with NBC News Investigations. She reports on health, science and the environment and is a graduate of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York.