Identifying discourses shaping international scientific collaborations in Iranian higher education

Today, the development of international scientific activities has become one of the main concerns of the world's top universities in order to increase credibility, quality, revenue generation and branding. Therefore, the present study was conducted with the aim of identifying the discourses that shape international scientific cooperation in Iranian higher education. The present study is purposeful, applied and with a qualitative approach. The target group of the present study was the managers of the international department of the country's public universities and experts in this field. Using targeted and snowball sampling method, 13 managers of the international department of public universities and 5 experts in this field were selected as a sample. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data and data analysis was performed by content analysis. After analyzing the data obtained from the interview, the total number of free codes extracted from the interviews was 119 codes, which after merging the same codes with each other, finally remained 75 codes, which were classified in 6 similar concepts and finally discourse. Forms of international scientific cooperation in the country's higher education were categorized into four main discourses: cultural discourse, economic discourse, international discourse of science, and political discourse.