Abstract
Organisations must increasingly transform themselves to take advantage of technological change. Today, ICT allows public bodies to make new use of procurement mechanisms that achieve economies of scale and greater flexibility. Meanwhile, international comparisons of scientific output measures can help to shed light on the variation in productivity of different national research funding systems. Finally, examining bibliometric data to calculate collaboration between authors affiliated with different countries, this chapter compares and draws conclusions on research intensity and collaboration strength for different countries and regions, research fields and over time. The authors conclude with detailed observations on the actual evolution of S&T collaboration, both within the GCC and with other parts of the world.
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Notes
- 1.
See Dimitri et al. (2006) for an overview of the economic analysis of procurement.
- 2.
These projects are CAAST-Net (Coordination and Advancement of sub-Saharan Africa-EU Science & Technology Cooperation Network), IncoNet EECA (S&T International Cooperation Network for Eastern European and Central Asian Countries), EULARINET (European Union – Latin American Research and Innovation NETworks), MIRA (Mediterranean Innovation and Research Coordination Action), SEA-EU-NET (Facilitating the Bi-Regional EU-ASEAN Science and Technology Dialog) and WBC-INCO.NET (Western Balkan Countries INCO-NET), (European Commission, 2011).
- 3.
We used data from JCR 2009 for our analysis of the top-20 research areas of the GCC and Yemen and data from the JCR 2010 for our analysis of the evolution of research fields and the research strength and collaboration in the GCC Research Priority Areas. The JCR 2010 had not been published when we did the former analysis. The adjusted total cites metrics that we construct using data from these JCRs however appear highly correlated.
- 4.
The network matrix used for mapping the network ignores any co-authorship links amongst and within countries outside of the GCC and Yemen. These co-authorships represent only a small subset of the total co-authorships between and within countries outside of the GCC and Yemen due to the way in which publications are selected (based on affiliation with the GCC and Yemen) and are therefore uninformative.
- 5.
Based on the descriptions of the GCC Priority Areas in Flesia (2011), we have taken “Health” to comprise publications in the ISI subject categories Biotechnology Applied Microbiology, Biochemistry Molecular Biology, Endocrinology Metabolism, Pathology and Genetics Heredity. “Energy(Security)” comprises publications that are classified under ISI subject category Energy Fuels, while “ICT” comprises search results for the topic “Information and Communication Technology” in the ISI Web of Science database. The priority area “Environment, Water & Climate” is taken to comprise publications in the ISI subject categories Environmental Sciences, Water Resources, Marine Freshwater Biology, Agriculture Dairy Animal Science, Agronomy and Fisheries.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank participants of the conference on “Best Practice in S&T Policies EU-MENA Countries”, Muscat, December 2010, as well as participants of the INCONET-GCC meeting in Venice, November 2011, for their useful comments.
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Prat, A., Ytsma, E. (2013). Innovation in the Public Sector: Experiences in E-Procurement and University Research. In: Andersson, T., Djeflat, A. (eds) The Real Issues of the Middle East and the Arab Spring. Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5248-5_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5248-5_10
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