Leveraging bridging universities to access international knowledge: Korean universities’ R&D internationalization

Bridging universities are research entities that connect the international research community with their domestic peer universities, referred as bridged universities. In this paper, we study co-authorship networks using international collaborative publication data from Korean universities and investigate the structural relationships between 142 Korean universities and 105 foreign countries. The results reveal the presence of bridging universities at the center of the international R&D networks. Further, we identify a positive relationship between bridged universities’ research outcomes and their collaboration intensity with bridging universities. However, a negative correlation is also found between bridged universities’ R&D internationalization and their collaboration with bridging universities. Universities, especially in latecomer countries where access to international knowledge is limited, are advised to balance their utilization of bridging universities with contacting global partners directly for their internalization efforts.