Proximity dimensions and scientific collaboration among academic institutions in Europe: The closer, the better?

Abstract

ABSTRACT:The main objective of this paper is to examine the effect of various proximity dimensions (geographical, cognitive, institutional, organizational, social and economic) on academic scientific collaborations (SC). The data to capture SC consists of a set of co-authored articles published between 2006 and 2010 by universities located in EU-15, indexed by the Science Citation Index (SCI Expanded) of the ISI Web of Science database. We link this data to institution-level information provided by the EUMIDA dataset. Our final sample consists of 240,495 co-authored articles from 690 European universities that featured in both datasets. Additionally, we also retrieved data on regional R&D funding from Eurostat. Based on the gravital equation, we estimate several econometrics models using aggregated data from all disciplines as well as separated data for Chemistry & Chemical Engineering, Life Sciences and Physics & Astronomy. Our results provide evidence on the substantial role of geographical, cognitive, institutional, social and economic distance in shaping scientific collaboration, while the effect of organizational proximity seems to be weaker. Some differences on the relevance of these factors arise at discipline level.

Does distance hinder the collaboration between Australian universities in the humanities, arts and social sciences?

“…For the purposes of this paper, it is useful to note the definitions for two of these dimensions: "geographical proximity is defined as spatial distance between actors, both in an absolute and relative meaning" and institutional proximity relates to "the fact that interactions between players are influenced, shaped and constrained by the institutional environment" (Boschma, 2005, p. 63). Other approaches have included defining regions, within and across national boundaries, using geographical coordinates (Katz, 1994;Lorigo & Pellacini, 2007;Scherngell & Hu, 2011;Sidone, Haddad & Mena-Chalco, 2017;Waltman, Tijssen & van Eck, 2011), and combinations of these with Boschma's dimensions (Fernández, Ferrándiz & Leon, 2016;Frenken, et al, 2009;Hoekman, Frenken & Tijssen, 2010).…”

“…Boschma's proximity dimensions have been applied in some studies, as has the use of gravity models (Acosta, Coronado & Ferrándiz, 2011;Evans, Lambiotte & Panzarasa, 2011;Fernández, Ferrándiz, & Leon, 2016;Frenken, et al, 2009;Hoekman, Frenken & Tijssen, 2010;Ponds, van Oort & Frenken, 2007;Scherngell & Hu, 2011;Sidone, Haddad & Mena-Chalco, 2017). A common finding is that publication numbers are positively associated with collaboration (Acosta, Coronado & Ferrándiz, 2011;Frenken, et al, 2009;Fernández, Ferrándiz, & Leon, 2016;Hoekman, Frenken & Tijssen, 2010). That is, collaboration is likely to be higher when those collaborating (a country, region or institution) are more prolific publishers.…”

The early adulthood of the Asia Pacific Journal of Management: A literature review 2005–2014

“…Most of them reflect inter-regional cooperation, that is, research networks whose authors' institutional affiliation includes different regions. This is a distinctive and valuable feature of the literature published in APJM-recent studies have focused on the international business field (López-Duarte, Vidal-Suárez, González-Díaz, & Rosa-Reis, 2016) and multi-field studies (Fernández et al, 2016;Hoekman, Frenken, & Tijssen, 2010) show a much lower ratio of inter-regional scientific collaboration.…”

“…The latter is more salient (in a statistically significant way) in the second sub-period. As shown in Fernández, Ferrándiz, and León (2016), both organizational proximity (e.g., same/similar regulations and routines) and institutional proximity (e.g., same/similar laws, policies, culture, and language) foster scientific collaboration. Conversely, collaboration with nonacademic institutions is extremely scarce, although it is more salient within the second sub-period.…”

Application of entity linking to identify research fronts and trends

“…Unlike "bag-of-words" methods, the proposed method groups phrases in texts with the same meaning. For example, Science Citation Index is referred to as "Science Citation Index", "SCI", "Science Citation Index-Expanded", "SCI Expanded", "SCI-E" and "SCIE" by IS articles (Elango et al 2016;Fernández et al 2016;Zhou and Lv 2015). While the method proposed groups these terms, a "bag-of-words" approach would consider the terms as separate mentions, thereby reducing the effectiveness of comparing documents that describe the same concept using different terminology.…”