Public–private interactions reflected through the funding acknowledgements

Abstract

Partnership between the public and private sectors has been studied using different methodologies; among them, scientific articles offer an objective way to quantify and assess some of these public-private interactions. The present paper takes advantage of the funding acknowledgements (FA) section included in WoS articles written in English and studies some features of the funded research, such as impact and collaboration. For this purpose, articles with Spain in the address field are selected and retrieved (years 2008-2013), dividing them in two sets: articles with or without FA. Besides, given the large volume of items, the study is focused on groups of articles of each area selected by stratified random sampling. Additionally, those items with a FA section are analysed to identify three types of funding sources: only public, only private, or both sectors. The results show differences between areas in terms of presence of FA and types of funding sectors. On the one hand, in general, articles funded by both the public and private sectors present the best impact, as well as the highest number of authors and organisations. On the other hand, there are important variations in impact and collaboration between areas depending on types of funding sectors. Thus, items funded by both the public and private sectors show the highest significant impact in Clinical Medicine, Life Sciences and Physics, having also greater international collaboration, in most areas, than articles funded only by the public sector. Finally, some limitations of this study are identified and some recommendations for funders and authors are offered.

Collaboration and impact of research in different disciplines with international funding (from the EU and other foreign sources)

“…Besides this higher RCR can be indirectly linked to a greater international collaboration, although there are neither interactions between them nor significant differences between research fields. These results are consistent with what was observed in previous studies, that both international collaboration and/or the variety of funding sources are related to greater citation rates (Gök et al 2016;Morillo 2016). Nevertheless, other input variables must also be taken into account.…”

“…Previous works have analysed funding comparing various research fields. For instance, some authors study the presence of funding acknowledgements in each field (Álvarez-Bornstein et al 2018;Costas and van Leeuwen 2012;Díaz-Faes and Bordons 2014;Huang and Huang 2018), while others examine the research impact in relation to the subject of study, finding higher figures in medical areas with joint public-private funds (Morillo 2016). For their part, Huang and Huang (2018) recommend that government agencies improve their understanding of the real needs of some less-funded thematic fields such as the humanities.…”

The Geography of Scientific Collaboration

“…In comparison to co-authorship, acknowledgements are less tangible and also rarely employed in depicting spatial patterns of research collaboration. So far, spatially oriented acknowledgement analyses have referred mostly to university-industry collaboration (see for instance: Morillo, 2016;Wang & Shapira, 2015). The development of this approach was facilitated in 2008 by the introduction of the Funding Text field by the Web of Science, which made the acknowledgement data available on a massive scale and opened up new research possibilities (Paul-Hus, Desrochers, & Costas, 2016).…”

Public–private contribution to biopharmaceutical discoveries: a bibliometric analysis of biomedical research in UK

“…Other contributions measured the role of funded articles as an indicator of research quality (Gillett 1991;Costas and van Leeuwen 2012;Zhao 2010). Also, partnerships between the public and private sectors in multiple disciplinary areas have been studied using funding acknowledgement section of Spanish articles (Morillo 2016) founding that 79% was financed by the public and 18% in combination with private. The accuracy and completeness of the extraction process adopted by the extant literature have been the object of some recent contribution which also questioned and tested the robustness of the bibliographical databases reporting funding information (Rigby 2011;Grassano et al 2017).…”