How do alumni faculty behave in research collaboration? An analysis of Chang Jiang Scholars in China

Recruiting overseas alumni as faculty within their Chinese alma mater has become a common phenomenon in Chinese universities. This paper studies how the alumni linkage, the connection between alumni faculty members and their alma mater, influences the individual collaborative behaviour of returnee scholars. The results show that alumni faculty are inclined to conduct less intra-institutional collaboration than non-alumni faculty, and the impact of alumni linkage on a scholar's propensity towards international collaboration is not significant. Both results are inconsistent with expectations. The importance of local networking and other factors in Chinese research culture may cause returnee scholars to exhibit such unexpected behaviours in collaborative propensities. Another central finding is that alumni faculty members tend to publish in journals with an average greater impact factor than non-alumni faculty. We therefore argue that alumni linkage has played an important role in bringing about the prosocial behaviour of alumni faculty by strengthening their motivation to pursue quality research, and that the strength of a returnee scholar's local academic network also has a great impact on their tendency towards high impact research.