Sustainability Issue #3 October 2009

This is printed from sustainability.formas.se, last updated 9/17/2009 12:33:17 PM

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Middle aged men have many foreign partners

Conferences are the meeting places. According to the author of this article, researchers usually meet their future partners in international projects at scientific conferences.  Photo: Jonas Förare

Middle aged men have many foreign partners

Generally speaking, male researchers have more international research partners than women, and men of upper middle age have more partners than younger men. On average, however, men and women spend the same proportion of their working time on international collaboration. There was some difference in international engagement among researchers from different disciplines, with natural scientists generally the most active. In most cases, researchers find their international collaborative partners at scientific conferences. This is revealed in a survey among researchers funded by Formas.

In the spring of 2008, a survey was conducted regarding the international activities of researchers who had received grants amounting to at least KSEK 300 from Formas between 2005 and 2007. These 750 persons were asked to answer around 15 questions relating to the countries involved in collaboration, regular research collaboration, and the exchange of postdoc scholarship holders and visiting researchers.

465 people answered, two thirds of whom were men. Half were aged over 50, and a similar proportion considered themselves to be natural acientists. Between 80 and 90 per cent of the respondents said that they had spent some working time on international collaboration during the period concerned.

About half had at least one international research partner with whom they had practical research collaboration during at least one week per year. The proportion was, on average, higher for men, 57 per cent, than for women, 44 per cent. Older researchers had more international research partners than younger ones. Men had more partners than women.

Karolinska Institute, Stockholm and Lund universities

Researchers from Karolinska Institute (but with relatively few respondents) and the universities of Stockholm and Lund had the most partners. It was by far the most common for an international research partner to be found at international scientific conferences.

There was some difference between researchers from different disciplines in how active they were in international collaboration. The degree of activity was generally highest among natural scientists (Natural sciences > Medicine > Technology > Interdisciplinary sciences > Social sciences and Humanities).

The UK, USA, Germany and Australia were the four most frequent countries of collaboration for pure research projects. If data relating to researcher training and evaluations are also taken into consideration, the Nordic countries are among the leaders. A majority of the respondents considered that their research had high, or some, relevance for developing countries.

 

Prior to work on the research policy bill of 2008, the Government had asked the research councils to survey the international engagement of Swedish researchers. The aim was to provide the Government with a basis for special research policy measures as support for the internationalisation of research. However, the Bill did not contain a lot regarding the international aspects of research policy. The Government intends to return to this issue. A full report on the survey can be downloaded from www.formas.se

 

Responsible for this page: Birgitta Bruzelius

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