The Influence of International Scientific Collaboration with English-speaking Countries on the Research Performance of Brazilian Academic Institutions

Scientific collaboration, a practice that traces its roots back to the birth of modern science, has spread through the research community, expanding the ties between institutions and countries and becoming a strategy to improve research productivity. Collaboration with institutions from countries of renowned scientific leadership thus constitutes a clear opportunity for the scientific advancement of academics as well as institutions worldwide. This work focuses on the set of Brazilian papers indexed by InCites between 2010-2019 to analyze the advantages, measured in terms of the citation impact and percentage of publications in Q1 journals, as well as (just for the papers published between 2014 and 2018) the position in the ARWU Global Ranking of Academic Subjects, derived from the sustained scientific collaboration with institutions from Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, and the United States. Our results show that collaboration with these four countries presents clear advantages for Brazilian institutions in all areas of knowledge. In particular, our study shows that the percentage of publications in Q1 journals doubles, and the citation impact increases markedly for the set of papers in collaboration with the aforementioned countries. Our study also shows that, by and large, Brazilian academic institutions benefit from these international collaborations to improve their positions in the current edition of the ARWU Global Ranking of Academic Subjects


INTRODUCTION
Scientific collaboration has its roots in the birth of modern science, during the 17 th century, in France, as an answer to the professionalization of science the country was experiencing at the time. [1]Nowadays, international collaboration has become a reflection of scientific quality, [2] and its practice has grown into a strategy for scientists to improve their research productivity and the level of their research endeavors.
A countries' scientific capacity can be measured through several indicators that put nations such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada in the top positions, followed by continental European countries such as Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, France, and Germany, as well as Japan, Israel, and Australia, while Brazil appears to belong to the group of lagging countries. [3]The growth in the world's scientific capacity is one of the factors that, together with the easier access to communication technologies and the decrease in travel prices, are behind the growing influence of networks.6][7] According to McManus [8] USA and UK are the first and second major scientific partners, Canada and Australia being between the 10 major partners.

Literature Review
In a study conducted under a historical and sociological perspective, [1] Beaver and Rosen identified several examples of scientific collaboration in the 17 th century: Kepler and Brahe, Hooke and Boyle, Lavoisier and Laplace, Dulong and Petit, Gauss and Weber.It is said that the expression "invisible colleges" was first used by Comenius in a meeting with British experimentalists around 1641.Boyle, who was in the meeting, used the expression in a letter to his advisor in 1645 to describe the interactions of a small group of natural philosophers. [3]e level of co-authorship in Science has raised steadily in the past 40 years.In a recent analysis of co-authorship, [9] Zhigang et al. showed that the collaboration between individuals has been growing, from an average of 2.2 authors per paper in 1980 to 7 in 2019.The number of institutions involved in each paper has also grown, from an average of 1.59 in 1980 to 2.66 in 2019.However, international collaboration between countries has grown at a much slower rate, with averages of 1.14 countries in 1980 and 1.48 in 2019.
][12] Leta and Chaimovich [13] reported significant gains (up to 40%) in impact derived from international collaboration.Papers written in collaboration are more cited for several reasons, such as the wide dissemination of the work and the possibility of citations proportional to the number of authors [14] and the involvement of international leaders in the organization and supervision of several groups that often come from different areas. [15]Collaboration also influences the acceptance of the submitted papers, due to the degree of technical competence exposed in the multi-authorship. [16]ordons et al. [6] identified differences in the impact related to the country of origin of the team leading the research effort.Studies led by scientists from countries of global scientific leadership, such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, usually attract a high number of citations.Partnering with institutions from those countries becomes then very attractive for other researchers.Together with the type of collaboration -national or internationaland the scientific performance of the collaborating country, the order of authorship is an important detail that has not been overlooked in the literature.Chinchilla Rodriguez et al. [17] noted that Brazilian papers indexed on Clarivate Analytics from 2000 to 2016 follow a pattern that falls short of the world impact averages.Domestic papers (published among Brazilian authors) and those published in international collaboration in which Brazil takes the position of the corresponding author, fall short of the world average.
University rankings gather indicators that should reflect several aspects of academic excellence. [18]Bibliometric indicators of scientific output and citation are present in every international university ranking and receive weights ranging from 20 to 100% of the final score.Kaycheng [19] observed a strong correlation between the various criteria considered individually; some criteria contributed very little and would be masking, in fact, the relevant dimensions measured in the ranking.Robinson-Garcia et al. [20] showed that, despite the differences in methodology, as well as the weights attributed to publication and citation data, all rankings tend to measure a combination of the number of articles produced by the university and their relative citation impact.Therefore, bibliometric indicators that combine the volume of publications and the volume of citations, as well as the average number of citations per publication, can offer an image of research universities that is very similar to the scenario shown by international rankings.
It is in that context that co-authorship and the credits given to each author -and, as a result, to each university and country of affiliation -gain some spotlight in current discussions.Authors' contributions in published papers fall roughly into three categories: those who sign as the first author, those who sign either as the corresponding and/or the last author, and those who contribute with no specific role. [21]The corresponding author has gained status as the most important author among analytical approaches. [22]Corresponding authors are usually among the senior components of the group, the ones who • PUB: Total number of papers (article type) between 2010 and 2019.
• PPUBC: percentage of papers (over PUB) in CORR AUTHOR.
• PPUBN: percentage of papers (over PUB) in NO ACKS COLL.
• CNCI: Category Normalized Citation Impact, calculated by dividing the citation count by the expected citation rate (baseline) for publications sharing the same type of document, same year of publication, and same area.
• CNCIA: Category Normalized Citation Impact for papers in ACKS COLL.
• CNCIC: Category Normalized Citation Impact for papers in CORR AUTHOR.
• CNCIN: Category Normalized Citation Impact for papers in NO ACKS COLL.
• CIT: Total number of citations.
• PCITC: percentage of citations (over the total number of citations) to papers in CORR AUTHOR.
• PCITA: percentage of citations (over the total number of citations) to papers in ACKS COLL.
• PQ1: Percentage of publications in the first quartile by Journal Impact Factor.most contribute to guarantee the research funding; [23] they are responsible for the research project, for bringing together the co-authors, and for the preparation of the paper.Several studies about scientific collaboration [6,17] take the role of the corresponding author into account.Being a corresponding author has become a symbol of leadership and responsibility.
In this study, we will use the set of papers with at least a corresponding author belonging to an institution as one of the baselines to make comparisons with the papers derived from specific international collaborations of the researchers from that institution.

METHODOLOGY
The First, we carried out a descriptive analysis of the number of papers produced by the selected Brazilian universities, including the number and percentage of citations, Category Normalized Citation Impact, and the number and percentage of papers published in journals of the First Quartile.We will use the "ALL" label for this set of papers.Then, we identified all papers where an author from a Brazilian university took the role of the corresponding author.In the Tables that follow, results associated with this set of papers will lie under the "CORR AUTHOR" label.
Considering the relevance of international collaboration with Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, [4][5][6][7] our study then identified the papers co-authored by Brazilian researchers and at least one researcher from any of those four countries.Results associated with this set of papers will lie under the "ACKS COLL" label.As we want to compare the impact of international collaboration when it involves or not those four countries, the "NO ACKS COLL" label will refer to the set of papers (co-authored by Brazilian researchers) not included in the "ACKS COLL" collection.
For better readability, we have used acronyms for all the universities included in the tables that follow.Table 1 shows the correspondence of the chosen acronyms to the universities' names.Table 2 presents the list of subjects and acronyms.
In Tables 3 to 10, we will include the following indicators associated with different sets of papers from an institution: all institutions in this subject".Institutions' scores on CNCI are then "calculated as the proportion of their CNCI to the maximum value.If an institution's CNCI is higher than the maximum value, its score on CNCI will be assigned as 100". [24]r this study, we have chosen all the subjects that include at least five Brazilian universities in the corresponding ARWUGRAS Ranking.We have also selected the three subjects in the Social Sciences showing the largest presence of Brazilian universities.Finally, we have included in the list of 21 subjects four additional topics that cover a substantial share of the scientific production of Brazilian universities, namely Biology, Chemistry, Human Biology, and Materials Science and Engineering.
To perform the simulations needed for the study we extracted from InCites the raw measures of all Brazilian universities ranked in the chosen subjects.The data for these simulations correspond to the period 2014-2018, as stated by the 2020 edition of ARWUGRAS.It constitutes, therefore, a subset of the complete set of data used in the other part of the study.To cancel the effect of international collaboration we recomputed the scores as follows: for every institution and subject, we assigned the average raw values of the indicators (Q1, CNCI,

Data Analysis
Analysis of data was carried out using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS 23.0), with Pearson's product moment analysis of correlation for values of the normalized citation impact and percentage of Q1 publications in ACKS COLL and the groups ALL and CORR AUTHOR to check the validity of the hypotheses a) and b) outlined in the introductory section of the paper.Partial Correlation analyses were used to check whether those correlations held when controlling for four relevant covariates (Total number of papers, and percentage of papers in ACKS COLL, CORR AUTHOR, and NO ACKS COLL).

ARWUGRAS Analysis
The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), a.k.a. the Shanghai Ranking, produces an annual classification by subjects -Shanghai Ranking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects (ARWUGRAS)-that brings visibility to many Brazilian universities listed in subject rankings close to their fields of specialization.ARWUGRAS comprises 54 subjects split into large areas, namely, Natural Sciences, Engineering, Life Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Social Sciences.Those areas roughly correspond to five of the Clarivate's GIPP areas.
The 2020 rankings rely on bibliometric results from the period 2014-2018, aggregated through a weighted combination of the following indicators: -Q1: Number of publications (article type) in the first quartile of the Journal Citation Impact.
-CNCI: Average number of citations per article normalized by the Web of Science category and publication year.
-IC: Percentage of international collaborations.
-TOP: Number of publications (article type) in a list of key journals.
-AWARD: For some subjects ARWU makes use of an additional indicator that refers to the "total number of an institution's staff that has won a significant award in an Academic Subject since 1981.The awards were identified through the ShanghaiRanking's Academic Excellence Survey" (ARWUGRAS 2020).
In the 2020 edition of ARWUGRAS, all the bibliometric indicators relied on raw measures of research parameters for publications (article type only) between 2014 and 2018.As stated in the ARWUGRAS Methodology (ARWUGRAS 2020), for all the indicators except CNCI final scores "are computed from raw measures as the square root of the percentage of the top-scored institution".As of CNCI, "The maximum value of the indicator in a subject is set as the lower value of: (1) the twice of the average CNCI for all institutions in this subject; (2) the maximum of the CNCI for For each subject, N TOTAL (N BRAZIL) is the total number of universities (Brazilian universities) included in the ARWUGRAS 2020 official list.
and TOP) obtained for the CORR AUTHOR collection of papers to the set of papers ACKS COLL.

Computation of the Modified Scores
To compute final scores, we follow ARWUGRAS's methodology.
Let X be a Brazilian institution with a raw value of r x for a particular indicator.Let r max be the top raw score for that particular indicator among all the institutions ranked.
Hence, applying ARWU's methodology, the score of the institution X, s x , in that indicator is computed as follows: ARWU rounds the value to the first decimal digit, 55.1, as the ARWUGRAS webpage for the Agricultural Sciences shows. 1 We then calculated the new scores after canceling the effect of the international collaboration.Researchers from UNESP published 3354 papers in the Agricultural Sciences between 2014 and 2018, 768 of them in Q1 journals.The percentage of Q1 papers in that period (taking into account only papers with at least a corresponding author affiliated with UNESP) was 22.2 for that subject.Out of the 768 Q1 contributions from UNESP in the period, 212 papers were included in the ACKS COLL set.Now, the total number of papers of UNESP in ACKS COLL was 451.Hence, assuming that those papers were from the "CORR AUTHOR" set, the expected number of Q1 papers would have been 100 (22.2% of 451).Therefore, the new raw score for UNESP in Q1 would be 768-212+100=656.
Carrying out the same computation for Wageningen University and Research produces a new Q1 raw score for that institution, 2487, which again reaches the maximum value of all the modified scores of universities in the ARWUGRAS list.
The new score for UNESP in the indicator would then be ′ = = s x 100 656 2487 51 4 .
In the next section, we present the results of the complete simulations.

RESULTS
To investigate the extent to which scientific collaboration benefits the research performance of Brazilian universities in terms of bibliometric impact, we have identified the total number of papers indexed in InCites for each university and the number of papers in which an author affiliated with a Brazilian university assumed the position of the corresponding author.
Table 3 presents some results for the 25 Brazilian institutions with the largest number of papers published between 2010 and 2019, indexed in the InCites database.
On average, researchers from those 25 universities occupy the corresponding author position in 49.3% of their publications.Those universities show, except in a few cases, a share of papers signed as the corresponding author larger than the average share of all Brazilian institutions (43.6%).Table 3 shows several disparities, starting with the great difference (an order of magnitude) between the institutions with the highest and lowest scientific production in the period analyzed (column PUB).Although less noticeable, differences in institutional profiles can also be seen in CIT, PQ1, and CNCI.
The percentage of papers with a corresponding author from the institution (PPUBC) varies from 38% to 59.7% and shows no significant correlation with the total number of papers (r=-0.125,p=.55).Nor does the percentage of citations to papers with a corresponding author from the institution (PCITC), ranging from 19.3% to 59.7%, (r=-0.061,p=.77).
The percentage of Q1 contributions decreases in the set of papers CORR AUTHOR; the gap ranges from 0.9% to 20.8%, with an average of 8.5%.This means that the association with other institutions (in or outside Brazil) in which the other institution takes the lead of the investigation helps but does not radically improve the ability of Brazilian universities to publish in the first quartile.We will check later whether accounting only for the collaboration with institutions from the four English-speaking countries selected for our analysis does have a substantial impact on %Q1 Figures.
When comparing the Category Normalized Citation Impact of all papers published by Brazilian institutions included in   the difference in mean between CNCIA and CNCIC is about 4.5 times larger than the one between CNCIN and CNCIC.
It is worth pointing out that the dispersion of CNCIC is very low, ranging from .52 to .76 with a standard deviation of 0.05.On the other hand, CNCIA shows a far larger range (1.13, 3.04) and standard deviation (0.50).This indicates that a sizable share of the differences in impact among Brazilian institutions may be attributed to the collaboration with the four English-speaking countries.Indeed, CNCI (Table 3) and CNCIA (Table 4) are positively correlated, and the association is statistically significant (r= 0.89, p<.001).
To check whether this effect was associated with the size of the institutions we carried out the same analysis for the sample of 230 institutions in Brazil with at least 200 papers between 2010 and 2019.We found CNCI and CNCIA positively correlated and the association statistically significant (r=0.79,p<.001).
We also investigated (for the sample of 230 institutions) the effects of the variables related to the total number of publications (PUB) and to the proportion of publications in ACKS COLL (PPUBA), NOT ACKS COLL (PPUBN), and CORR AUTHOR (PPUBC) in the relationship between CNCI and CNCIA through partial correlation analyses.We found a positive partial correlation relationship between CNCI and CNCIA, controlling for: PUB (r=0.79,p<.001), PPUBA (r=0.87,p<.001), PPUBC (r=0.79,p<.001), and PPUBN (r=0.81,p<.001).The comparison with the zeroorder correlation (r=0.79)suggest that controlling for all those covariates had little effect in the relationship between CNCI and CNCIA.
for both baselines, particularly in the Health Sciences.In the case of the Arts and Humanities, in spite of the low number of papers in ACKS COLL and NO ACKS COLL there are substantial gains associated with international collaboration.However, one of the areas, Engineering and Technology, does not appear to improve from the collaboration to the same extent.

Analysis by GIPP Areas
In Table 6 we summarize the average effects of the ACKS collaboration in the CNCI and percentage of Q1 publications for the 20 institutions with more publications in the period 2010-2019 on the six GIPP areas.
A short analysis of each GIPP area using a larger sample of Brazilian universities follows.We found a positive correlation relationship between CNCI and CNCIA, as well as between PQ1 and PQ1A, in all the areas.A positive correlation was also found between CNCI and CNCIN; however, the differences in mean between CNCIN and CNCIA are also statistically significant, with CNCIA consistently much higher than CNCIN in all the areas.Results of the corresponding t-tests are shown in Tables 7 and 8.
We also found a positive partial correlation relationship between CNCI and CNCIA, as well as between PQ1 and PQ1A, controlling for covariates related to the number of publications (PUB), as well as the percentage of papers in On average, the share of Q1 papers by Brazilian institutions in ACKS COLL is larger than the share of Q1 papers in CORR PAPER.We found a significant difference in the scores for PQ1A (M=53.1,SD=6.2) and PQ1C (M=42.6,SD=3.7), t(24)=7.27,p <.001.Extending the analysis to the sample of 230 institutions with at least 200 papers between 2010 and 2019 we found PQ1 and PQ1A positively correlated and the association very statistically significant (r=0.68,p<.001).
The advantage of collaborating with researchers from these four countries is also clear in the analysis of specific areas.
Table 5 shows the results of the collaboration with the four English-speaking countries in the six areas of the GIPP schema.We will contrast the results of the ACSK COLL set of papers with two baselines: the CORR AUTHOR and the NO ACSK COLL sets of papers.
The percentage of papers in ACKS COLL fluctuates around 20%, except in the case of Engineering and Technology and, most dramatically, the Arts and Humanities.The gains from the collaboration in terms of normalized impact are apparent We extended the analysis to the 182 institutions in Brazil with at least 75 papers in the Health Sciences between 2010 and 2019.We found CNCI and CNCIA, as well as PQ1 and PQ1A, positively correlated.The association is statistically significant (r=0.91 p<.001, r=0.61 p<.001, respectively).

Physical Sciences
On average, institutions with at least 1,800 papers in the Physical Sciences between 2010 and 2019 multiply the citation impact by 2.7.In this area, a decrease in the percentage of papers as corresponding author is observed, on average, when the institutions show larger percentages of papers in collaboration with English-speaking countries; the relationship is statistically significant: PPUBI is negatively correlated with PPUBC (r=-0.84,p<.001).The association holds for the Health and Life Sciences as well, but it is not statistically significant (p>0.01).
We extended the analysis to the sample of 145 institutions in Brazil with at least 75 papers in the Physical Sciences between 2010 and 2019.We found CNCI and CNCIA, as well as PQ1 and PQ1A, positively correlated.The association is statistically significant (r=0.78p<.001, r=0.66 p<.001, respectively).

Social Sciences
On average, institutions with at least 300 papers in the Social Sciences between 2010 and 2019 multiply the citation impact by 3.5.
We extended the analysis to the sample of 76 institutions in Brazil with at least 50 papers in the Social Sciences between 2010 and 2019.We found again CNCI and CNCIA, as well as PQ1 and PQ1A, positively correlated.The association is statistically significant (r=0.78p<.001, r=0.62 p<.001, respectively).
Complete datasets used in the analysis are available upon request.
As we shall show, the specific results of the different GIPP areas follow the same pattern observed in the previous analysis of all the scientific production of Brazilian institutions.

Life Sciences
Large Brazilian institutions show CNCI data substantially higher for ACKS COLL papers (CNCIA) than for CORR AUTHOR papers (CNCIC).On average, Brazilian institutions with a sizable scientific production in the Life Sciences (in excess of 1,000 papers between 2020 and 2019) multiply the citation impact by 3, and all of them see their CNCI increase at least two-fold.
We extended the analysis to the 219 institutions in Brazil with at least 100 papers in the Life Sciences between 2010 and 2019.We found CNCI and CNCIA, as well as PQ1 and PQ1A, positively correlated.The association is statistically significant (r=0.90 p<.001, r=0.61 p<.001, respectively).

Pre-Clinical and Health Sciences
On average, Large Brazilian institutions (with at least 1,800 papers in the Health Sciences between 2010 and 2019) for papers in collaboration with those four countries were replaced by averages over papers in which the corresponding author belongs to the institution under analysis.
The fact that we used the same procedure for all the institutions on the ARWUGRAS list, not only to Brazilian universities, helps in ensuring a fair comparison.
For each Brazilian university we computed the variation in the position in the ranking, as well as the ratio using the position in ARWUGRAS 2020 as baseline.We summarize the results of all the subjects analyzed in the paper in Table 10, which shows a general overview of all the subjects, including the average of all Brazilian universities listed in the corresponding ARWUGRAS subjects, along with the results of the universities listed in at least five subjects.Complete datasets used in the analyses of the different subjects are available upon request.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Results from this paper show that when a Brazilian university takes on the role of the corresponding author, the impact on the research decreases in most fields.Between 2010 and 2019, on average Brazilian institutions had a CNCI for papers in which a corresponding author was associated with them of 0.66, in contrast with the total CNCI of 0.86.These results are in line with the ones obtained by Moya Anegón et al. [7] Those authors observed that there is a tendency for the impact to decrease for all countries with respect to the papers in which the corresponding author belongs to the country (except for the USA) when that impact is calculated in relation to the all the papers published by researchers from that country.The results presented in Table 3 and 4 show that Brazil is not an exception to that rule.
The impact gains of papers in which the corresponding author is not affiliated with a Brazilian institution was also observed by Grácio et al. [25,26] (2019; 2020) for papers indexed by SCOPUS between 2003 and 2015.The authors showed that the impact increased by 68.1% when the Brazilian author was not the corresponding author.For the institutions in Table 3,

Arts and Humanities
This is an area not well represented in the Web of Science; however, the analysis carried out for the 36 institutions in Brazil with at least 40 papers in the Arts and Humanities between 2010 and 2019 shows that papers in this area also benefit from the ACKS collaboration in terms of citation impact.

Engineering and Technology
Papers in the area of Engineering benefit from the collaboration with researchers from English-speaking countries in terms of citation impact, although not to the same extent as the other five areas of knowledge.That difference being acknowledged, it is worth highlighting that on average institutions with at least 1,000 papers in Engineering and Technology between 2010 and 2019 multiply the citation impact by 1.75.
We extended the analysis to the sample of 122 institutions in Brazil with at least 75 papers in the Engineering and Technology between 2010 and 2019.We found CNCI and CNCIA, as well as PQ1 and PQ1A, positively correlated.The association is statistically significant (r=0.69p<.001, r=0.50 p<.001, respectively).

ARWUGRAS RESULTS
Since major academic classifications rely on bibliometric data, it is clear that the kind of international collaborations analyzed in the present study are bound to have a positive impact on the ranking positions of Brazilian universities.In particular, the analysis of the Shanghai Ranking by Subjects will enable us to identify the areas in which the positions in the ranking of Brazilian universities most benefit from the collaboration with the four English-speaking countries.
As stated in the section devoted to discussing the methodology, we recalculated the score of all the universities in the ARWUGRAS classifications when bibliometric Figures areas according to the GIPP classifications (on average, the factor ranges from 1.75 in Engineering and Technology to 3.5 in the Social and Health Sciences).This results support the validity of hypotheses a).
The quartile analysis of the journals in which the papers were published also reveals the positive influence of collaborating with major English-speaking countries, and supports the validity of hypotheses b).On average, 51.5% of the papers in collaboration with these countries were published in journals of the first quartile, almost twice the percentage found for the papers whose corresponding author is affiliated with a Brazilian institution -which represent the 27.5% of the total number of papers.(2011), science is becoming increasingly global, and the participation of all countries is necessary to face problems that affect all countries.

As shown in
Prompted by an analysis of highly cited scientists in Latin America, Martinez and Sá [27] stated that while yet a regional leader, as far as scientific production is concerned, Brazil is still relatively peripheral to global science.Mc Manus et al. [8] argue that their findings point in a different direction, one in which "Brazilian researchers are seen to be effectively collaborating to world prominent themes of high impact and to advance the innovative science".Our results corroborate Mc.Manus et al. [8] findings in what concerns the advancement of innovative science in Brazil through international scientific collaboration.However, we have also shown that the gap between the impact of the science produced in Brazil with or without international collaboration with major Englishspeaking countries is still noticeable, particularly in Physics and the Health and Life Sciences.
rankings of the international cooperation with researchers from major English-speaking countries.The two largest areas in the Life Sciences, Biology, and Human Biology, also show large negative ratios.The results in those four subjects are consistent with the large impact of the international ACKS collaboration in CNCI and the proportion of Q1 publications analyzed before in the paper.In the Natural Sciences, Physics is the subject in which the benefits of the cooperation are more noticeable.In the Social Sciences, the benefits are also clear in Economics and Political Sciences.The results in the Engineering subjects show that Brazilian universities, when all the institutions see the effect of the ACKS collaboration removed, keep up with their positions in the ARWUGRAS rankings.Three cases are worth highlighting: Mathematics, Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Management.In those three areas, the quality of the scientific production having a corresponding author affiliated with the Brazilian institutions helps in advancing through the ranking.
Our findings point to a general advantage gained by Brazilian universities in collaboration with Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, or the United States, thus supporting the validity of hypotheses c) formulated in the Introduction.
The results also help in shedding light over one of the leading questions of this study posed in section 1: "Is there an area of Brazilian science that benefits the most from collaboration?"For a number of subjects, there would be a loss of positions if the collaborations with English-speaking countries were canceled; that would happen, notoriously, for Clinical Medicine, Public Health, Physics, Biology, and Human Biology, subjects that account for more than 40% of the scientific production of Brazilian universities.To a lesser extent, the effect is also noticeable in the areas of Materials Science and Engineering, and Chemistry, subjects that account for more than 10% of the scientific production of Brazilian universities.In the Social Sciences, the benefits are apparent in Economics and Political Sciences.
The second question posed in section 1, "Is there an area in which the Brazilian authors who take on the position of the corresponding author get more recognition?"can also be partially answered using the results from Table 10.Mathematics, Pharmacy, and Management emerge as the areas in which the extra help from international collaboration is not needed to advance in the respective rankings.
Corroborating Bordons et al. [6] and Wagner, [3] our results for some of the analyzed subjects show that researchers and institutions with unique knowledge can be found in Brazil.
Those scientists can become strategic partners not only for their geographical, biological, or social conditions but also for their expertise in specific disciplines.According to the report on scientific collaboration published by the Royal Society

• PQ1C :
Percentage of publications in the first quartile by Journal Impact Factor of papers in CORR AUTHOR.• PQ1A: Percentage of publications in the first quartile by Journal Impact Factor of papers in ACKS COLL • PQ1N: Percentage of publications in the first quartile by Journal Impact Factor of papers in NO ACKS COLL.

Table 3
On average, papers in ACKS COLL represent around 16% of all the papers associated with Brazilian institutions but manage to attract in excess of 33% of the total citations, whereas t(24)=12.70,p<.001.As of the collaboration excluding those four countries, the association also holds: CNCIN and CNCIC differ in the scores, CNCIN (M=0.93,SD=0.05) and CNCIC (M=0.66,SD=0.06), t(25)=24.7,p<.001.However,

Table 10 ,
the areas that concentrate the largest share of the scientific throughput of Brazilian universities clearly highlight the impact of the collaboration with Australia, Canada, The United Kingdom, and the USA in the ARWUGRAS rankings.In particular, two subjects in the Health Sciences, Clinical Medicine (CLI) and Public Health (PUH), account for more than 75% of the scientific production of Brazilian institutions in that area.The large negative ratios point to the great impact in the respective AWUGRAS The analyses of the number of citations and category normalized citation impact CNCI show large gains for Brazilian universities derived from the association with institutions from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, or the United States.As Tables7, 9show, Brazilian universities multiply their normalized impact in all the major research