Collaboration uncovered: Exploring the adequacy of measuring university-industry collaboration through co-authorship and funding

Abstract

Analysing co-authored publications has become the standard way to measure research collaborations. At the same time bibliometric researchers have advised that co-authorship based indicators should be handled with care as a source of evidence on actual scientific collaboration. The aim of this study is to assess how well university-industry collaborations can be identified and described using co-authorship data. This is done through a comparison of co-authorship data with industrial funding to a medical university. In total 436 companies were identified through the two methods. Our results show that one third of the companies that have provided funding to the university had not co-authored any publications with the university. Further, the funding indicator identified only 16% of the companies that had co-authored publications. Thus, both co-authorship and funding indicators provide incomplete results. We also observe a case of conflicting trends between funding and co-authorship indicators. We conclude that uncritical use of the two indicators may lead to misinterpretation of the development of collaborations and thus provide incorrect data for decision-making.

Do university–industry co-publication outputs correspond with university funding from firms?

“…Lundberg et al (2006) compared companies funding research conducted in Karolinska Institute in Sweden with those co-publishing with this particular university. They found that one third of the companies that had provided funding to the university did not co-publish any scientific paper with the university, thus concluding that UICs provided incomplete results on the actual collaborations between university and industry.…”

“…Indeed, only a few studies have tried to shed some light on this issue (e.g. Lundberg et al 2006;Wong and Singh, 2013).…”

Does “birds of a feather flock together” matter—Evidence from a longitudinal study on US–China scientific collaboration

“…For example, based on research collaboration between firms and universities, Lundberg, Tomson, Lundkvist, Skar, and Brommels (2006) argued that the uncritical use of either coauthorship or funding may mislead readers and policy makers. In the context of Chinese nano research, however, it is reasonable to believe that most research collaboration is finally presented in the format of a coauthored paper since most Chinese nano publications originate in universities and public research institutes, whose main goal is to publish (Shapira & Wang, 2010;.…”

Network Positions, Similarities, Prior Collaboration Experiences and the Evolution of Co-authorship Networks

“…It may also help to reduce the negative effects on scientific research output due to the limitations of individual scholar's cognitive ability, and improve the scientific research quality and research output. As an important form of collaboration between scholars, the quantity and quality of co-authored papers may reflect the strength and intensity of collaboration, which can be used to measure the development of academic network and research output(see Katz and Martin, 1997;Laudel, 2002;Lundberg et al, 2006;Hoekman et al, 2009 for a discussion).…”