Searching for research integration across Europe: a closer look at international and inter-regional collaboration in France

TLDR

European science coauthorships have doubled in the last decade, yet the overall collaborative network remains largely unchanged, showing that EU policies have not forced a more homogeneous pattern of collaboration. The study investigates how frontier regions in France contribute to the European collaborative network. Border regions are more open to international partners than to other domestic regions, and although internationalization proceeds more slowly than expected, targeted R&D programs can stimulate collaboration without altering long‑standing domestic co‑authorship patterns.

Abstract

Intra-European S&T coauthorships doubled in the last decade, but the collaborative network was surprisingly unaffected. The strongly voluntarist process in the European Union seems far from making collaboration unavoidable or homogeneous. We address the role of frontier regions in the collaborative network, taking France as an example. The study confirms the openness of border regions to their close neighbors abroad, but their level of preference for other regions within the same country is higher. We argue that internationalization/ Europeanization in science develops much more slowly than generally thought, and R&D programs aiming to develop multinational collaboration may be effective in spurring collaborative efforts, without greatly changing the patterns of durable scientific relationships established through producing co-authored articles.