The impact of research collaboration on academic performance: An empirical analysis for some European countries

Socio-Economic Planning Sciences. 2018. Vol. 62. P. 13–30.

Aldieri L., Kotsemir M. N., Vinci C. P.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of internal and external research collaborations on the scientific performance of academic institutions. The data are derived from the international SCOPUS database. We consider both quantity (the number of publications) and quality indicators (the field-weighted citation impact and the share of publications in the 10% most-cited articles) to evaluate universities' performance in some European countries (Germany, France, Italy, the UK and Russia). To this end, we develop a non-overlapping generations model to evidence the theoretical idea of research externalities between academic institutions. Moreover, we implement an empirical model to determine the extent to which the impact of internal and external collaborations on universities' performance is sensitive to the geographical dimension of the data.

Highlights • The paper investigates the impact of internal and external research collaborations on the scientific performance of academic institutions. • It highlights the importance of both quantity (the number of publications) and quality indicators (the field-weighted citation impact and the share of publications in the 10% most-cited articles) to evaluate universities' performance. • It explores universities' performance in Germany, France, Italy, the UK and Russia for the period 1996–2015. • Empirical findings show that international collaborations help universities' quality index but the results are differentiated by groups of countries.

Keywords: scientometrics, research collaboration, university studies, research evaluation

Publication based on the results of: Foresight tools for the study of digital transformation processes in the economy and the society (2018)