Factors Affecting Researchers' Collaborative Patterns: A Case Study from Maghreb Universities

This article examines the factors affecting researchers’ collaborative behaviour, based on the results of a survey of 285 researchers from three universities in Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia). For each country, results indicate that the majority of researchers prefer to collaborate (in order of preference) with their peers in their own research group, with foreign partners, and with national collaborators from other universities. European partners are preferred in terms of foreign collaboration, followed by researchers from other Maghreb countries. While researchers from the United States of America (USA) and the other Arab countries do not appear to be the preferred partners for Algerian researchers, those from Morocco and Tunisia favour collaboration with their peers from these countries. Results also show that scientific collaboration is mainly developed through personal contacts, and that cooperation agreements between institutions do not seem to stimulate researchers to intensify their scientific collaboration. Finally, over two-thirds of the respondents considered tools such as Skype and social media to be key factors for building and enhancing collaboration, and experienced researchers use these tools more extensively. This article highlights the need for an increased coherence between researchers’ expectations and their universities’ scientific collaboration policies.