arXiv · 2510.02743
Bi-National Academic Funding and Collaboration Dynamics: The Case of the German-Israeli Foundation
Abstract
Academic grant programs are widely used to motivate international research collaboration and boost scientific impact across borders. Among these, bi-national funding schemes -- pairing researchers from just two designated countries -- are common yet understudied compared with national and multinational funding. In this study, we explore whether bi-national programs are associated with new collaborations and lasting partnerships. To this end, we conducted an observational bibliometric case study of the German--Israeli Foundation (GIF), covering 642 grants, 2,386 researchers, and 52,847 publications. Our results show that GIF funding is associated with increased co-authorship behavior during, and even slightly before, the grant period, but it is rarely linked with long-lasting co-authorship patterns that persist once the funding concludes. By tracing co-authorship before, during, and after the funding period, clustering collaboration trajectories with temporally-aware K-means, and predicting cluster membership with ML models, we find that 45% of teams with no prior co-authored publications become active while funded, yet activity declines rapidly post-award; roughly one-third sustain longer-term co-authorship activity, whereas only a small subset sustains high, lasting co-authorship activity. Moreover, the team's composition and bibliometrics are found to be largely insufficient in predicting co-authorship activity during and after the grant.
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Amit Bengiat, Teddy Lazebnik, Philipp Mayr, Ariel Rosenfeld. 2025-10-03. Bi-National Academic Funding and Collaboration Dynamics: The Case of the German-Israeli Foundation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02743
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