The Role of Institutional Context in Shaping Migrant Scientists’ New Research Collaborations

This paper investigates the critical role of institutional context in shaping the research collaboration patterns of migrant scientists. Prior scholarship on the impact of migration on collaboration largely focuses on migration to established scientific hubs or back to a scientist’s home country, leaving a gap in understanding how collaborations form in nascent research environments where scientists lack pre-existing ties. We address this gap by focusing on foreign scientists who have migrated to the Arabian Gulf, a region with a heterogeneous academic landscape that includes a few world-class universities as well as many under-resourced, teaching-heavy universities. We employ a mixed-methods approach, beginning with a large-scale bibliometric analysis of nearly 5,000 foreign scientists’ co-authorship patterns before and after their move to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. This quantitative analysis revealed a statistically significant increase in the number of collaborators post-migration, but also a high turnover, with most new co-authors located outside the Gulf, indicating a sustained reliance on international networks. Our subsequent interviews with 77 scientists in these three countries highlighted five collaboration types they initiated, linked to the research conditions in their university. In better-resourced, internally integrated and externally connected research settings, we observed ‘complementary,’ ‘coaching,’ and ‘commissioned’ collaborations respectively. In under-resourced environments, we heard mainly of ‘compensatory’ collaborations, and in high-pressure environments focused on publication metrics, we encountered more ‘corrupt’ collaborations. These findings challenge the assumption that scientific collaborations are universally positive, demonstrating instead that collaboration type is deeply shaped by institutional context.