International Survey of Research University Faculty: Means of Scholarly Communications and Collaboration

This report looks closely at how scholars find research collaborators and how they communicate with them. The data and commentary explore issues such as: How many scholars are collaborating at a distance? How many are collaborating with those in other cultures? In the same university as their own. How do they find these collaborators? What role is played by scholarly meetings? What is the impact of the university library? The research office? Technology Licensing? How have the use of bibliometrics and altmetrics impacted the process of finding and collaborating with scholarly partners? How many scholars have co-authored an article? How many are working with foreign scholars on a collaboration? Once scholars start on a collaboration, how do they communicate? Through Skype? Go-to-Meeting? Google Hangout? Viber? Slate? WebEx, Adobe Connect and other vehicles for scholarly connections? The report also presents hard data on how often scholars conduct scholarly meetings and how satisfied they are with their current methods of communication and how they view university efforts to assist them in locating and communicating with scholarly partners. partners. The survey data is based on a survey of more than 500 scholars drawn from more than 50 major research universities in the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. Data is broken out by various criteria, such as type of university, scholar’s country, gender, political views, academic subject specialty, academic title and other criteria. Just a few of the 138-page report’s main findings are: 50.69% of respondents are currently collaborating or coordinating research with scholars or other researchers from other universities or colleges outside of their country. Web based meetings were most common in the Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics, Chemistry and other Science and Technology fields, 33.70, and least common in the Literature and Languages fields, 2.92. 7.72% of respondents routinely use Adobe Connect to communicate with scholars at other locations. 87.52% of respondents have co-authored a journal article with one or more other authors. Co-authorship was most common in Australia/New Zealand, 96.77%, followed by Canada, 93.10%, and the UK/Ireland, 89.83%. It was least common in the USA, 85.07%. Scholars from the following institutions were surveyed for the report: Australian National University, Baylor College of Medicine, Brown University, Carleton University, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Curtin University, Drexel University, Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Griffith University, Imperial College London, James Cook University, Massey University, McGill University, Monash University, Penn State University, Queen Mary University of London, Reading University Rice University, Rockefeller University, Rutgers University, Saint Louis University, Swinburne University of Technology, Trinity College Dublin, UConn Health Center, University of California, Davis, University College Dublin, University of Alberta, University of Birmingham, University of California Santa Barbara, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Riverside, University of Chicago, University of Florida, University of Idaho, University of Leeds, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Nottingham, University of Reading, University of Tasmania, University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center, University of Toronto, University of Utah, University of Western Australia, Virginia Commonwealth University, Washington State University and Yale University.