International research collaboration (IRC) is, despite often being represented by the proxy of co-authorship, a social process involving sharing knowledge, experience, and skill to produce nascent insights in science (Bozeman & Boardman, 2014). This phenomenon, driven by the global flow of knowledge to create an open and accessible knowledge system that benefits all stakeholders, has gained momentum in an increasingly interconnected, interdependent, and multipolar world. Recognizing its transformative potential, IRC has been supported by both multilateral organizations and national governments through deliberate internalization policies to leverage its benefits for individuals, institutions, and nations. This mounting support and the very benefits of IRC have significantly elevated international science and knowledge systems, which is evidenced by the rise in the internationally produced co-authored publications, citations, and projects, as well as the growth of national science systems. 

At the individual level, IRC ensures recognition, prestige, research skills, productivity, and an extended network (Thompson, 2006; Turpin & Niu, 2021; Yemini, 2021) while it promises increased quality and reputation, a more internationalized structure, and resources for institutions (Chachkhiani & Tabatadze, 2024; Gorska et al., 2020; Lebeau & Papatsiba, 2016). As for countries, it expands the research capacity, provides economic benefits through boosting innovation and technology transfer, and facilitates the process of solving global challenges in a complementary manner (Echeverría-King et al., 2023; Sabharwal & Varma, 2015; Thelwall et al., 2023). These multiple benefits of IRC at the macro, meso, and micro levels created differentiated motivations for each stakeholder to engage in collaboration internationally. While these benefits underline the value of engaging with IRC, it is equally crucial to understand the underlying motivators that drive researchers, institutions, and countries to participate in IRC. As mentioned above, scholarly research points out these motivational drivers from different country contexts at various levels and for different disciplines. Despite the value of the accumulated knowledge in unpacking motivational drivers, it remains fragmented in reflecting holistic schema and bringing together Global South and Global North perspectives and narratives in collaboration, as well as how it has been conceptualized in different contexts. Besides, higher education has been in transformation depending on geopolitical dynamics (Moscovitz & Sabzalieva, 2023), which we argue can have an impact on IRC motivations and conceptualization.

At this point, Marginson's (2024) discussion on higher education institutions’ space-making activities provides valuable insights into this complexity. He draws attention to the ‘dual spatiality’ of universities, caught between competition tensions: global and open versus national identity. Further, he indicates how Euro-American hegemony still shapes global science, particularly through language and produced knowledge, even the rise of China and other middle-sized power countries in the science system challenges this dominance. Additionally, the geopolitical impact in the internationally collaborative science system could also be observed with the recent retreat of U.S. support for China, leading to the first-ever decline in jointly produced scientific outputs (Marginson, 2024). In this context of the altered geopolitical environment and evolving internationalization policies, our systematic review aims to build a diverse and comprehensive perspective free from discipline, country, time, and policy restriction in IRC by demonstrating the landscape of IRC and indicating how it has been shaped through time. Based on this perspective, this review aims to cover the following research questions: 

1. What are the growth, methodological, disciplinary, and geographical trends in the IRC literature?
2. What are the key theoretical frameworks and conceptual models used to define IRC across disciplines? 
3. How is IRC conceptualized in the literature? 
4. What are the key motivators of IRC at individual, institutional, and country levels? 

This study, as part of a larger research project, aims to systematically identify and synthesize the relevant literature on IRC to develop a comprehensive understanding of how the landscape of the IRC field has changed and grown in terms of volume, conceptualization, theoretical models, disciplinary focus, and methodology. In addition to mapping the field to identify its evolution temporally and geographically, this study seeks a detailed understanding of the conceptualization of IRC across various disciplines and nations and the identification of the motivators that drive individuals, institutions, and countries to realize IRC. A systematic review is a comprehensive research methodology that identifies and synthesizes all related studies on a specific topic (Petticrew & Roberts, 2006), which coincides with our research focus and enables us to provide a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural perspective to IRC. To conduct this systematic review, we utilized the guidelines in the PRISMA statement to ensure transparency. First, keywords focusing on the group, outcome, and context were identified that refer to researchers and graduate students, international research collaboration, and higher education, respectively. Second, the peer-reviewed and empirical articles published in English and indexed in Web of Sciences, Scopus, and EBSCO-host were set as the inclusion criteria. The documents written in other languages, published as conference proceedings, book chapters, and conceptual papers, and conducted outside the higher education context were excluded from the corpus. The initial search was done at the title, abstract, and keyword in selected databases with the mutually identified search string that yielded 2420 studies, of which 1202 were duplicates. At the screening and eligibility phase, 1072 studies were removed from the corpus due to topical, methodological, and contextual irrelevance and duplication. The final corpus covered 162 studies, and the data retrieved from this corpus included year, country context, methodology, and motivators. To ensure the trustworthiness of the final corpus, each team member checked and evaluated the relevancy of different search strings. In this way, we cross-evaluated each other’s final conclusion. After finalizing the corpus, we cross-checked 10% of the randomly selected articles by re-retrieving the data and analyzed the similarities and differences retrieved by two different researchers, which indicated high similarity. The data were descriptively and inductively analyzed by the research team by utilizing Excel and MAXQDA.

The preliminary analysis indicates that IRC has been shown interest by various disciplines considering the variety in the journal representation. The studies in our corpus were published in various journals in social sciences (n = 91), natural sciences (n = 38), medical and health sciences (n = 18), and had multidisciplinary coverage (n = 15). Further, IRC is an of late evolving concept, attracting the attention of scholars from both Global North and Global South as the research studies were dominantly published after 2020 and onward (n= 147), mostly piled between 2018 and 2024 (n= 101) and realized in multiple country contexts (n= 74). As for the definition of IRC, our initial results showed that IRC was dominantly conceptualized as a product of collaboration between researchers from different country contexts, yet very limited research approached IRC not only as a product but also as a process of building and enhancing collaboration. Overall, the initial research findings displayed the scope of IRC that majorly focused on the regional and country-level trends of IRC, the conceptualization, and motivators of IRC, that demonstrated researchers engaged in IRC for several reasons, such as building their research capacity, skills, and knowledge, and to enlarge their network and accessing to international funds.

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