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

Report Highlights

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 or potential 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.