The Diffusion of Information Technologyand the Increased Propensity of Teams toTranscend Institutional and National Borders

This study examines the relationship between the diffusion of IT and changes in collaborationpatterns across institutional and national borders. To undertake the research, the authorsmatch an explicit measure of institutional IT adoption (domain names, e.g. www.umsl.edu)with institutional data on all published papers indexed by ISI for over 1,200 U.S. four-yearcolleges, universities and medical schools for the years 1991-2007. The publication dataexamined cover the social sciences and natural sciences and narrower fields such aseconomics and biology. Two measures of institutional collaboration are examined: (1)percent of papers produced by a U.S. institution with one or more co-authors at another U.S.institution (US-US); and (2) percent of papers produced by a U.S. institution with one or morenon-U.S. coauthors (US-INTL). We first describe collaboration patterns across universitiesand then use regression analysis to examine the impact of IT exposure on multi-institutioncollaboration. IT exposure is measured by the number of years elapsed since an institution’sadoption of a domain name. Results indicate dramatic growth in the percentage of both USUSand US-INTL collaborations, as well as important differences by field. The study providesmodest evidence that length of IT exposure has had a positive and significant effect on bothUS-US and US-INTL collaborations....