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

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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 and Chemical Engineering, Life Sciences and Physics and 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.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, we use the term universities in a broad sense, to include all Higher Education Institutions.

  2. We selected these disciplines because they are among the disciplines most prone to collaborate according to our descriptive analysis.

  3. A description of data and the collection procedure is provided in EUMIDA. 2010. Feasibility Study for Creating a European University Data Collection [Contract No. RTD/C/C4/2009/0233402].

    Data collection 1 is available at http://ec.europa.eu/research/era/areas/universities/universities_en.htm (Accessed at 18/10/2012). Data Collection 2, which contains more detailed data, was not available to us at the time of this research.

  4. Note that we do not give a detailed analysis for Medicine and Biomedicine because some of the publications may be associated with university hospitals, which may or may not have been co-authored by academics. Publications for which it has not been possible to establish a clear link with an academic institution have been excluded from our sample. Thus, our study may underestimate the scientific output in this discipline.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank reviewers for their valuable comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales de Cádiz, University of Cadiz, Enrique Villegas Vélez, 2, 11002, Cádiz, Spain

    A. Fernández, E. Ferrándiz & M. D. León

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  1. A. Fernández
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  2. E. Ferrándiz
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  3. M. D. León
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Correspondence to E. Ferrándiz.

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Fernández, A., Ferrándiz, E. & León, M.D. Proximity dimensions and scientific collaboration among academic institutions in Europe: The closer, the better?. Scientometrics 106, 1073–1092 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1819-8

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