Diversified resources and academic influence: patterns of university–industry collaboration in Chinese research-oriented universities

Abstract

This paper investigates the scope and patterns of university-industry collaborations (UICs) in Chinese research-oriented universities. Based on the co-authored publications in international journals by Chinese universities' academics and researchers from industries with the method of bibliometric and latent cluster analysis, this study provides detailed results on the characters and clustering features from two aspects, namely diversified resources and academic influence. The results show that, although the co-authored publications with industrial researchers only account for a small part of all publications of Chinese universities, the importance of cooperation with industries in the academic research and the scientific contribution have been strengthened in China. Meanwhile, the academic influence of coauthored publications is periodically improving, but still in the development stage of quantity rather than quality. The analyses demonstrate that there are significant differences in the matching relationship of diversified resources and academic influence between universities. Only few UICs are in both the high level of diversified resources and strong academic influence. Most of UICs should attempt to maintain diversified resources advantages whilst also try to enhance academic influence of cooperation outcomes.

Inter-organizational scientific collaborations and policy effects: an ego-network evolutionary perspective of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

“…Many studies have examined this topic either on the side of universities (e.g., Boardman and Ponomariov 2009;D'Este and Perkmann 2011;Wigren-Kristoferson et al 2011) or on the side of firms (e.g., Kafouros et al 2015;Mathews and Hu 2007), but only few studies have investigated this topic on the side of public research institutes. Besides, even though China's IUR collaborations have already attracted attentions of some scholars in recent studies (e.g., Fan et al 2015;Hong and Su 2013;Kafouros et al 2015;Liang et al 2012;Su et al 2015), the research on this topic from a network perspective is still scant. In this paper, we contribute to the literature by examining the dynamic evolution of scientific collaborations of public research institutes with enterprises or/and universities in China from a network perspective.…”

“…Despite these limitations however, co-authored SCI-E papers have been widely used and validated as a proxy for collaboration relationships (Park and Leydesdorff 2010;Wagner 2008) because these papers still provide basic, useful, and effective information of scientific collaborations among actors. In this study, we comprehensively consider the search strategy previously developed and tested by Fan et al (2015), Leydesdorff (2003), Park et al (2005), and Ye et al (2013), and describe our search strategies in ''Appendix''. Meanwhile, we adopt the strategy of data cleaning developed and employed by Hu et al (2012).…”

“…Thus, collaborations across public research institutes, universities and industries are important in China's national innovation system. In this context, some recent studies were devoted to investigating Academia-Industry collaborations in China (e.g., Fan et al 2015;Hong and Su 2013;Kafouros et al 2015;Liang et al 2012;Su et al 2015). However, existing literature has not investigated this topic from the perspective of public research institutes.…”

“…We also attempt to provide policy-driven explanations for the evolutionary process of IUR collaboration networks, which may deepen our understanding of the effects of government S&T policies on the scientific collaborations of CAS with industries and universities in China. Second, Academia-Industry collaborations in the Chinese context have attracted the attention of scholars in recent years (e.g., Fan et al 2015;Hong and Su 2013;Kafouros et al 2015;Liang et al 2012;Su et al 2015). However, extant research on this topic remains insufficient to reveal the evolutionary trend and dynamics of China's IUR system.…”

The role of the Chinese Key Labs in the international and national scientific arena revisited

“…Other studies focus, using bibliometric approaches, on the internationalization of Chinese journals (Wang, Wang and Weldon 2007;He and Liu 2009), or on the production and citation impact of Chinese authors within a single journal (Yan, Rousseau and Huang 2016). The bibliometric performance of China within different scientific fields has also been studied (Huang et al 2015;Sun and Hua 2015;Yan and Sun 2015;Yang et al 2015), as well as university-industry co-publishing (Fan, Yang and Chen 2015) and university-industry-research institute copublishing (Gao, Guo and Guan 2014) in China. Chinese science policy, including the role of KLs, is discussed in (Benner, Liu and Serger 2012).…”