The Effects of Collaboration on Research Performance of Universities: an Analysis by Federal District and Scientific Fields in Russia

The objective of our paper is to explore the extent to which the research collaborations could be an impact on the scientific performance of academic institutions. The analysis is based on data for 241 universities in Russia for 2015-2016 obtained from different sources: Interfax (privately held independent major news agency in Russia) National Ranking of Universities, monitoring of efficiency of activity of educational organizations of higher education (launched by Information-Computing Centre of Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation), and Russian Science Citation Index (largest Russian information and analytical portal in science, technology, medicine, and education and electronic library of scientific publications with 28 mlns of documents). We consider the number of citations of publications to evaluate university performance in Russia. To this end, we develop a non-overlapping generation model to evidence the theoretical idea of research externalities between academic institutions. Moreover, we implement different empirical models to test for the effect of external scientific collaborations on the institutional research quality by Federal District and scientific field. The results confirm an important positive impact of co-authoring process.