Browse the full results of the World University Rankings 2026

It is widely claimed that international collaboration increases the impact of research but new analysis of data from ����Vlog reveals significant differences by country, with the trend barely visible in some nations.

Figures from the THE World University Rankings 2026 show that globally there is a positive correlation between international co-authorship of academic research and research quality – as measured by four metrics relating to citations, which together capture the calibre of both typical research and top research.

However, at 0.5, the correlation coefficient is not very strong (where 1 represents a perfect positive relationship) and there are some obvious outlier nations.

Mainland China, for instance, achieves the seventh highest score for research quality among the 32 nations with at least 20 ranked universities but is second from the bottom when it comes to the percentage of its academic publications that have at least one international co-author.

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China lags on global collaboration

This is partly a reflection of China’s size; academics based in countries with large populations tend to have less need to collaborate internationally. India, and to a lesser extent the US, also have relatively low levels of international collaboration given their research quality scores.

But Caroline Wagner, emerita professor of public policy at Ohio State University, who has extensively studied data on international co-authorship and research quality, said that the data also reflected the fact that China was still developing its science system, despite “doing incredibly good work at the frontier”.

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“We see a stratification in China that you’re not going to see as much in other scientifically advanced countries,” she said. “At the frontiers of research, China is doing extremely well…and then you have a very, very long tail” of lower-quality research from scholars who are not connecting with other scholars internationally, she added.

She contrasted this with the US where “the underlying knowledge system and…the science base is very deep and very complex”.

This pattern is visible in the rankings data; while China’s leading universities compete with their counterparts in the US when it comes to the quality of their top research, they are less strong when it comes to typical research quality.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Chile is fifth for international co-authorship but 24th for research quality, proving that cross-border collaboration is not synonymous with research excellence.

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Wagner said that Chile was one of several countries that “will invest in elite science” – such as a “glamorous and exciting” space programme, involving international collaboration – without “reinvest[ing] in that basic science capacity that they need in order to continue to flourish at those high levels”.

Australia and the UK achieve the highest average scores for research quality based on the rankings data, and also have high levels of international collaboration. Meanwhile, Russia receives the lowest scores in both areas.

ellie.bothwell@timeshighereducation.com