In the second assignment we are dealing with the:

Impact of collaboration on Europe's S&T performance

The understanding of internationalization processes of R&D is indispensable for policy making and taking strategic decisions. This is also true in the context of the "European Research Area" (ERA), which was launched in the year 2000, aiming at further integration of the European research system and achieving a higher degree of coordination and cooperation among the various players at all policy levels aiming at improved efficiency and effectiveness of still fragmented research efforts (European Commission 2007) in order to strengthen Europe's international competitiveness. And even though milestones have been reached towards the ERA, progress is mixed and a lot still remains to be done. Decisions concerning required actions and measures need to be taken based on reliable and valid information. Thus, it is crucial to have adequate tools for analysing the internationalisation process and its impact.

Internationalisation of S&T can take various forms such as the mobility of researchers, collaboration between partners from different countries, research activities from institutions abroad, informal knowledge exchange, and systematic exploitation and application of foreign knowledge e.g. by being present in other countries for know-how acquisition and networking. Thus, a variety of approaches and methodologies are required to capture and analyse internationalisation in order to arrive at a comprehensive description of the processes and trends. Recently the internationalisation of industrial R&D is a major issue being discussed in the scientific literature. Indicators applied to measure respective processes are R&D expenditures, R&D personnel of foreign firms or researcher's mobility. In this specific project we will concentrate on S&T collaboration with the main aim being to develop a set of indicators and a methodology for measuring various aspects of S&T collaboration and their impact on S&T performance which can be used to regularly monitor developments concerning the evolving degree of integration of ERA. S&T collaboration in this project will be specifically reflected by co-authorships (co-publishing) and co-patenting - knowing that these indicators cannot cover all aspects and all types of S&T collaboration.

International collaboration and co-authorship are very complex phenomena, which are driven by a variety of motives. However, the use of co-authorship data for measuring S&T collaboration is meanwhile well accepted and frequently used even though it can only partially reflect collaboration (Katz/Martin 1997; Laudel 2002). It was also found that intensified collaboration and the growth of co-authorships went together, and in particular for international collaboration the process of adequately acknowledging contributors works rather well, thus applying indicators based on co-authorship data is seen as not a perfect but appropriate method for the analysis of inter- or trans-national collaboration.

International collaboration as expressed by increasing internationally co-published papers is growing. Differences between the degree of international collaboration exist between countries but also sectors of science and technology. The discussion whether and to what extent international collaboration influences the impact of scientific publications is on-going. While for domestic collaborations no clear trend could be identified, international collaboration often seems to positively influence the impact of the respective publications. One issue that could contribute to an explanation of differences in impact might be that the motives to collaborate internationally differ. Thus besides analysing the patterns of international collaboration and the trends that can be observed over time, shedding more light into the motives for collaboration would also provide a clearer picture about the relationship between patterns of collaboration and how those collaborations influence S&T performance. Thus, the project sets out to:
 

• provide a literature survey on trans-national co-publication and co-patenting in the EU-15 since 1990;
• develop a methodology including suitable indicators to describe and monitor co-publication and co-patenting activities in the EU-15 since 1990;
• based on the methodology to be developed, gather the co-publication and co-patenting data needed to calculate the suggested indicators;
• conduct a pilot survey of co-publishing authors and co-patenting inventors to detect and uncover motivations, attractions, incentives and disincentives for international co-operations;
• prepare a final report on describing the methodology and outlining and discussing the main results of the analysis.

Status: ongoing (12/2007-03/2009)

Client: European Commission, DG Research

Partner: IDEA Consult, SPRU