Best Practices in North-South Research Collaborations: A Case Study of Sri Lanka

Gamage Sujata N, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

The outflow of S&T expertise from the developing world (or the South) to the developed world (or the North) is a concern to both parts of the world. Importance of research in this area is highlighted in the 2002 Science & Engineering Indicators Report of the U.S. National Science Foundation. Policymakers in the South also have an interest in ensuring that North-South partnerships bring true benefits to the South. For example, a key goal of the University Grants Commission of Sri Lanka is to nurture emerging nuclei of research excellence. The Commission views collaborative research between local and international researchers as a means to the desired end, and a study that sheds light on best practices in North-South collaborations would be of immediate relevance to the Commission. This investigator will select a set of researchers in Sri Lanka who have collaborated with other researchers, both local and international, identify nuclei of research excellence from among those researchers, and survey those individuals to determine if and how the research collaborations with the North affected the progress of their research careers. The concept of research excellence as it applies to a developing country will be explored in depth here. Publication and citation data for Sri Lankan researchers will identify researchers who have collaborated and the potential of those researchers to be nuclei of research excellence. A database of these 'nuclei of research excellence' will be set up using additional data collected from their curriculum vitae, interviews and questionnaires. Each joint publication by these researchers will be labeled a collaboration, and publication and citation data, interviews, and/or surveys will be used to compile a database of characteristics for each collaboration for a given researcher. The two datasets will be compared to elucidate links between the type of collaboration and the success of the researcher. S&T personnel of developing country origins who live and work in the developed world are a group that can useful in facilitating the reverse flow. Such a strategy, known as the Diaspora strategy, sounds feasible, but very little is known about the efficacy of such a strategy or how such a strategy compares with other strategies for developing R&D capacity in developing countries. A second goal of this proposal is to elucidate the role of the Diaspora in North-South research partnerships. Current studies on research collaborations do not pay sufficient attention to collaborations as goal oriented arrangements or address the structure of collaborations in depth. The proposed study situates collaborations as inputs to specific outcomes and analyzes the related structural features in depth. Answering this research question may indicate a strategy for balancing the brain drain from the South to the North. In addition, the research question addressed is of immediate relevance to the S&T capacity building strategy of Sri Lanka.