The relationships between distance factors and international collaborative research outcomes: A bibliometric examination

Abstract Increasingly, scholars have been conducting team-based research with multinational collaborators to carry out internationally relevant studies, generate global impact, and promote academic exchanges. In this paper, we examine how four types of distance, i.e., geographic, political, cultural, and economic, relate to the output of international research collaborations. We analyze a bibliometric data set derived from four leading marketing journals spanning the 2001–2016 time frame. Among other insights, our results show that in the context of international collaborative research efforts, co-authors from countries with wider economic distances and narrower political distances have published fewer articles and received fewer citations compared to those from countries with narrower economic distances and wider political distances.