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 observationa bibliometric case study of the German–Israeli Foundation (GIF), covering 642 grants, 2386 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 ware 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.