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The role of research collaborations for academic performance in Italy: An empirical analysis of Scopus data
There are different streams in the literature to explore research collaboration (Acosta et al., 2010; Fantino et al., 2015; Bergé, 2017; Shashnov and Kotsemir, 2018; Kotsemir, 2019). The topic concerning the research collaboration assumes a key role to the development of academic institutions in Italy, where a higher share of fundraising depends on scientific research output. As discussed in the literature (Aldieri et al., 2018), the knowledge flows arisen between researchers from different universities are relevant to enhancing the quality of research and at the same time Italian and Russian universities could improve their interactions with international partners. Paying attention to the Italian case, we intend to investigate the impact of research collaborations on the scientific performance of Italian universities in fields of economics and statistics.
Following this approach, we explore the variables which are the most significant inside the research production function and which could be important instruments to favour less opened institutions. In order to achieve our objective, we consider the following set of variables relative to universities: age and gender of authors; disciplinary field of publications; number of students enrolled; number of administrative staff employed; amount of study grants; foundation year of university; number of spin offs. To evaluate the output of scientific research we use a mean of 5 bibliometric indexes as the IF5Y (the Impact Factor calculated on a period of the last 5 Years), the AIS (Article Influence Score), the IPP (Impact Per Publication) the SJR (SCImago Journal Rank), and the H Index for the period 2010-2014 (see detailed description of all these variables in Aldieri et al., 2019).