Southeast Asia’s cross-regional research collaborations in the multiplex world: Current trends and future paths

Southeast Asia is currently experiencing momentum towards the regional harmonisation of its higher education systems, as also indicated by the recent declaration of the common higher education space in August 2024. Although much progress is still needed, the meaningful initiatives of ASEAN to bring together the ten countries and the role of SEAMEO in education-related harmonisation are important for the aforementioned endeavour. The diverse populations of Southeast Asia aspire to create an inclusive and harmonious space that is well-connected with other regions and nations worldwide. Thus, investigating the cross-regional research collaborations of Southeast Asian higher education is crucial to observing current trends and future paths for its connectivity with other regions and nations. This study examines the patterns of Southeast Asia’s cross-regional research collaborations with globally and regionally relevant systems using large-scale bibliometric data. The investigation focuses on major trends, research-area-based analyses, collaboration initiatives, and citation recognition. The analyses indicate a numerical increase in almost all aspects of research collaborations by researchers based in the region. Area-based analyses indicate that the region’s collaborations with China focus on STEM areas, as compared to social science and humanities with the EU and medical sciences with the US, highlighting the collaborating side’s expertise in specific areas. Findings also indicate that Southeast Asia-based researchers are unequally positioned in cross-regional collaborations as measured by leading authorship proportions. Furthermore, consistent with existing discussions, cross-regional collaborations increase citation impact, but there is room to increase the citation recognition of overall collaborative papers published by researchers in the region.