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The role of Chinese universities in enterprise–university research collaboration

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Abstract

In this paper the role of Chinese universities in enterprise–university research collaboration is investigated. This study focuses on a special aspect of the collaboration—co-authored articles. The two cases are analyzed: (1) research collaboration between Baosteel Group Corporation and Chinese universities; (2) research collaboration between China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation and Chinese universities. The co-authorship data over the period 1998–2007 were searched from CNKI database, the largest Chinese publication and citation database. The main findings are as follows: the number of articles co-authored by enterprise and university scientists has been increasing rapidly; the share of co-authored articles has been growing; the authors from universities are more possible to be the first authors; as a whole, enterprise–university co-authored articles tend to receive more citations and get downloaded more frequently; a mathematical orientation emerges in the enterprise–university articles. To reveal and describe such a trend the methods of keywords analysis and co-occurrence analysis are applied. The Chinese government’s policy instruments and substantial supports for pushing and improving enterprise–university research collaboration are introduced and analyzed.

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Acknowledgments

The work presented in this paper is sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number 70973118).

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Correspondence to Liming Liang.

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Liang, L., Chen, L., Wu, Y. et al. The role of Chinese universities in enterprise–university research collaboration. Scientometrics 90, 253–269 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0503-x

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