Expansion of cooperation between universities is a goal set by the governments of many countries. The values ​​of cooperation are celebrated both at the national level, when states support partnerships between universities within the country, and within the global agenda through internationalization of education (Wit, 2021). The programs of the European Union and the Bologna process are devoted to cooperation. Internationalization is being promoted through the documents of the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank, as well as university associations such as the International Association of Universities, the European Association of Universities and the European Educational Research Association. Since 2017 the European Universities Initiative (university cooperation as it is) has been developing. It was launched by the European Council at a meeting of European heads of state. On the website of almost any university you can find special sections with its partnerships, which not only can be additionally funded, but are also taken into account in ranking and other reputation studies (Hauptman Komotar, 2019). All this allows us to conclude that university partnerships are an extremely important topic at the national and international level.

However, what do we know about international partnerships as researchers: what research was done to study them and what were the results?

In order to answer this question, we conducted a survey on published studies study on interuniversity cooperation. Since we did not find other survey articles on interuniversity cooperation, we consider different types of questions. At the same time in the process of research we separated our research agenda from the research of collaborations between universities and business / industry / schools / communities etc.

In our survey we aimed to answer the following research questions:

What are the issues researches in the sphere of interuniversity cooperation?
How and by what methods interuniversity cooperation is studied?
What types of university partnerships are being researched and where are they located?
Are there proven, generally accepted data on the benefits of partnerships, preferred mechanisms for their implementation, theirs conditions. That are scientific grounds to rely upon when organizing an interuniversity partnership.

We used Google Scholar as a search engine for scientific literature databases. We chose 1999 as a cut-off point. That year the Bologna Declaration was signed, which we regard as one of the important political decisions aimed at stimulating cooperation. We addressed Google Scholar the questions in English, but did not set restrictions on the country of study. We used 4 types of queries "university partnership", "interuniversity collaboration", "interuniversity cooperation". The selection took place in stages: the sources were evaluated for relevance to the topic of the review. We were interested in interuniversity cooperation of any scale, but not in cooperation between universities and other contractors. At the same time, publications on cooperation with other counterparties were also collected, but not analyzed in detail. They were needed to compare the number of studies. In the second step a short form to answer survey questions was completed for each publication. Based on whether they provide specific information on one or more of the survey questions, the publications were collected for the analysis. Ultimately 196 publications were included in the review: scientific articles, conference proceedings, monographs or chapters, collaboration reports and doctoral theses, if indexed. Only those works were taken into account, access to which, in principle, could be obtained online (they are stored in digital form in the databases or libraries). At the last stage the completed forms were analyzed to answer the research questions.

Research on international cooperation obviously dominates over intra-country cooperation (124 publications vs. 40). Other works do not relate directly to international / national specifics. African countries can be noted as the most often studied (34 publications). This is obviously related to international support for Africa. Next come United States (32 publications), countries of the European Union (25) and Great Britain (21). Despite the large number of publications, it cannot be said that there is a big diversity in the research topics. A large proportion of articles deal with the description of individual cases or personal experience. Case study is the most popular format (41), usually such studies are descriptive. Only in some cases there are results of an interview or poll (Heffernan, 2005, 2018). Certain aspects of cooperation are also being explored: research on cooperation culture (Maringe, 2013), trust (Newell, 2000), importance of personal relationships (Ma, 2021), attitudes (Tetrevova, 2018). Bibliometrics (8) and even the use of joint hyperlinks by universities (Kenekayoro, 2014) are being studied to assess collaboration. Few studies address the causes of partnerships (Burg, D., 2017), and data-driven modeling of partnerships (Clark, 2010), (Ayoubi, 2008). Works that convincingly demonstrates the effectiveness or benefits of inter-university partnerships are rare (Koigi, 2018), (Weifang, 1999), while some articles identify problems and pitfalls (Lobnibe, 2020), (Yarmoshuk, 2018), (Carey, 2005). Interviews are quite popular as research method (28 studies, usually with the participants in the cooperation). In three cases the observation method was used (Newell, 2000), (Akkerman, 2012). The content analysis of university missions, memorandums and other official documents led to new research directions (Ayoubi, 2007), (Ishengoma, 2016). It can be concluded that for such an important topic as inter-university cooperation, there is a relatively small number of studies that can provide an evidence base for organizing or evaluating such cooperation.

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