To facilitate globalization, universities exchange human resources with overseas institutions by fostering synergies in research. This paper aimed to examine academic synergy gained from international collaborations in the Korean context, analyzing the government meta-data on global partnerships and research outcomes of 140 South Korean universities. Results from the proposed pilot model show that the number of partners in non-English speaking countries significantly affected international publications (IP) conceptualized as academic synergy; the numbers of outbound resources and the numbers of enrollees to graduate schools were also influential to IP; and IP from the private universities in rural areas appeared relatively lower. This pilot study using publicly available sources is noteworthy because it examines synergetic effects from international academic connections with overseas institutions.
Lee et al. (2022) studied this question.