National research impact is driven by global collaboration, not rising performance

We examine the link between a country’s average citation impact and both national research assessment and international collaboration. Our analysis finds little synchrony between national policies and performance change. We do find extensive, synchronous, cross-national change, however, despite a diversity of national research strategies. Specifically, during 1981–2020, there are synchronous cross-national changes in bilateral, and later multilateral, collaboration. We deconstruct the citation indicators and show that the average citation impact of domestic research and of collaborative research changes little for most countries. Net increases in average national citation impact have instead been driven by rising collaboration and the emerging global network. Greater collaboration enables greater subject diversity, contributes to convergence of subjects, and influences performance indicators. Coincidentally, it also results in all large nations apparently achieving higher average impact than the world average. These effects suggest a need both to strengthen policy analysis of the global context and to construct proper performance indicators when developing research strategy.