Public-private collaboration and scientific impact: An analysis based on Danish publication data for 1995–2013

Abstract

In the past few decades, there has been increasing interest in public private collaboration, which has motivated lengthy discussion of the implications of collaboration in general, and co-authorship in particular, for the scientific impact of research. However, despite this strong interest in the topic, there is little systematic knowledge on the relation between public private collaboration and citation impact. This paper examines the citation impact of papers involving public-private collaboration in comparison with academic research papers. We examine the role of a variety of factors, such as international collaboration, the number of co-authors, academic disciplines, and whether the research is mainly basic or applied. We first examine citation impact for a comprehensive dataset covering all Web of Science journal articles with at least one Danish author in the period 1995-2013. Thereafter, we examine whether citation impact for individual researchers differs when collaborating with industry compared to work only involving academic researchers, by looking at a fixed group of researchers that have both engaged in public-private collaborations and university-only publications. For national collaboration papers, we find no significant difference in citation impact for public-only and public-private collaborations. For international collaboration, we observe much higher citation impact for papers involving public-private collaboration.

Patterns and trends of university-industry research collaboration in Ghana between 2011 and 2020

“…Furthermore, while studies show that UIC on research can improve research productivity and impact (Abramo et al, 2009a), there is little evidence on the nature and extent of UIC in research in Africa and how it maps onto the global research output. For instance, sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) accounts for less than 1% of global research output and global citation impact, despite representing 14% of the global population (Blom et al, 2016;Fonn et al, 2018). The situation is even direr for Ghana, considering that the bulk of the scientific production in the subregion emanates from South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya (Duermeijer et al, 2018).…”

“…Despite the interest placed in collaboration and its benefits, as well as the UIC's support for development of the research capacity of universities (Bloch et al, 2019), the literature on UIC in Ghana is rare. Undeniably, the extant literature has reported on UIC in both the developed and the developing world (Bornmann, 2021), but studies, especially on collaborations between universities and industry towards the production of research publications in developing countries, and more particularly in Ghana, seem unclear, as most studies on UIC have been skewed mainly towards the challenges of UIC (e.g.…”