Not all collaborations are the same. NPR's Joe Palca reports that international collaborations are more likely to affect the wider scientific community.
Two ecologists — Stefano Allesina at the University of Chicago and the University of Florida's Emilio Bruna — became interested in whether there was a difference in what kind of journal the results from international collaborations were published in.
They thought that maybe "international collaboration and meeting and working with ecologists in other countries could be really beneficial to us as scientists," Bruna tells Palca.
Their team examined papers published in eight fields between 1996 and 2012 and reported in PLOS One earlier this year that the more countries listed among authors' affiliations, the better the papers did in terms of journal placement and citations.
"Your chances of getting into these top journals are much higher if you collaborate across nations," Allesina says. And then, he adds, citations rates, those articles have a higher impact that the typical articles in those journals because they are more highly cited.