The present study analyses the collaboration between Chilean and international scholars in educational research. Specifically, we address the role of European scholars for the development of the collaborative network of educational articles for the Chilean context, recalling that Chile is a developing country from Latin America. In this regard, we consider two main variables related with the diversity and inclusion aspects of this network: nationality and gender of collaborative scholars.

Collaboration in the construction of knowledge has been a topic with an increasing relevance in several fields, especially in the educational arena (Muijs et al., 2011). With the emergence of modern technologies of communication, collaboration among scholars seems to have increased in the last few decades. As a consequence, new relationships within and across countries have emerged.  Even though collaboration is really valued in the academic world, little is known about the patterns of these efforts in the educational field for developing countries. Accordingly, the main research questions that guide this study are:

(1) What are the patterns of international collaboration for Chilean educational research? (2) What is the role of European scholars on the Chilean educational collaborative network? (3) How diverse is both nationality and gender of European scholars in this network?

Considering these questions, our conceptual and theoretical framework is based on collaboration and internationalization of higher education institutions (HEI), taking into account that there is a worldwide trend toward the development of a more global knowledge creation and dissemination dynamics, taking advantage of the incorporation of social systems in concert with technological support (Börner et al., 2005). Collaboration has become an indispensable tool to promote, improve and increase research. In general, in this kind of collaboration network, the co-authorship decision could be made entirely by the authors, i.e., decision making is located at the level of individual actors (Barabási et al., 2002). This gives support to performing a focused analysis at the scholar level. In addition, collaboration seems to influence the research performance and dissemination, and also it is frequently considered a function of the internal group dynamics of different areas of study as well as scientific policy plans and strategies (Luukkonen et al., 1993).

Globalization has spurred an international knowledge structure in which academics and universities across the world may be involved. International co-authored papers are commonly used as a measure to obtain a comprehensive picture of the internationalization of research. At the scholar level, several studies have shown a strong and relevant relationship between collaboration, increasing academic knowledge and active roles in scholarship environments (Ding, 2011; Jiang, 2008).

In Latin America, internationalization is recognized as an important phenomenon that is influencing the flow and platforms of knowledge, as well as societies in general. These international patterns may be sustained by the emergence of Internet and other information and communication technologies, public policies and initiatives that promote more scholars and research at the country level, and possible regulations and directions that stimulate cross-country collaboration at the institutional level (Bohen & Stiles, 1998; Bouwma-Gearhart & Adumat, 2011, Muijs et al., 2011).

In fact, scholarly publication and their impact on rankings have had a remarkable influence across higher education institutions all around the world and education faculties have not been exempt from the ramifications either (Post et al., 2013; Fischman et al., 2010). One of strategies that higher education has developed to respond to and survive in the current climate of publishing pressure is to invest in partnerships to develop research (Altbach, 2007). Increasingly, these partnerships are acquiring an international, cross-disciplinary and team orientated approach (Baker, 2004).

Collaboration seem to be relevant in the academic world, with coauthorship efforts being a way to analyze it (Borner et al., 2005). Thus, new and innovative research can be conducted for this context, based on datasets retrieved from major digital libraries, using relevant keywords to search all articles of interest (Börner, 2007).For this study, we used bibliometric techniques, along with Social Network Analysis (SNA). Following the research design of previous studies (Barabási et al., 2002), we will single out the collaboration network as a case study, mainly because we need a specific network for which a dataset is explicitly available, along with a particular span of time. SNA techniques were applied in this study, in order to detect patterns of collaboration for educational research among actors within an international context, gaining a global perspective that unveils the potential differences in collaboration and actors’ properties within networks (Gazni et al., 2012). Because collaboration through co-authored articles implies bibliometric data, the latter can complement the main analysis with valuable descriptive statistics. Thus, SNA is a research approach that uses mathematic measures and visualization techniques to represent the configuration of connections between network’s actors (Scott & Carrington, 2011). In the case of this study, SNA is used to examine the relationships and patterns that emerge from a dataset of co-authored scholarly publications among educational scholars from Chile with colleagues around the world, taking into account a purposeful dataset retrieved from Web of Science (WoS). Based on several sociograms (“maps of science” that cannot be displayed in this proposal), along with bibliometric results, this study focuses on detecting which educational actors (scholars) are in strategic positions in the collaborative networks, explores the existence of clusters (social groupings within networks), and identifies what countries from Europe and around the world, represented by their scholars, are acting as positive contributors in the collaborative network as a whole, adding a gender perspective, being both nationality and gender measures of inclusion and diversity of the analysed network.

Between 1941 and 2014, 338 articles involving Chile were published on WoS, being 247 (73%) co-authored articles and 125 of them included an international collaboration (51%) with countries from all the continents. The patterns of collaboration emerge clearly since 2000, detecting 112 different clusters that represent several subfields within educational research. A total of 33 different countries has been collaborating with Chile in educational research, representing a total of 172 appearances. Chile has the largest collaboration with USA and Spain (both 44 appearances), followed by England (13), Germany (6) and Italy (6). Interestingly, 17 out of the 33 countries are from Europe. However, there are few or null appearances of scholars located on Eastern Europe nations. Even more. This seems to be triggered by rankings and other indicators of prestige of the colleges from North Western countries (Salmi, 2011), affecting the inclusion and diversity of other scholars from other admired educational systems, such as those from Nordic countries. At the scholar level, a total of 709 authors participated in the collaborative network. Among them, 444 authors declared an address in Chile (62.6%) and 265 listed a place abroad (37.4%). Since 2000, 98.3% of the scholars located abroad co-authored at least one article. From a gender perspective, most international scholars are men, although women collaborate more. Within the 117 women, since 2000, most of them are located in Spain (33), USA (31), and Argentina (9), appearing just in one article. This study shows that nationality and gender play and important role on international collaboration, specially affecting the inclusion of more women scholars and colleagues from some nations from Europe and around the world. Thus, more and better policies seem to be necessary in order to improve collaboration and diversity across the analysed network.

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