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Are organizational and economic proximity driving factors of scientific collaboration? Evidence from Spanish universities, 2001–2010

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Abstract

This paper aims to explore the effects that organizational and economic proximity have on scientific collaboration (SC) among Spanish universities, which are institutions in a peripheral country to EU-15. The methodology to address our research relies on data from a set of co-authored articles indexed in the Science Citation Index provided by Web of Science and published between 2001 and 2010 by 903 pairs of collaborating universities. This paper contributes to the existing literature in several ways. First, we aim to study how Spanish academic SC evolved in the period 2001–2010 in order to identify which universities were more prone to collaborate. Second, we analyse how collaboration across distance has evolved over time, considering two periods: 2001–2005 and 2006–2010. Finally, we put forward an econometric model to analyse how geographical, cognitive, institutional, social, organizational and economic proximity affect SC. Among other results, we find that differences in the size of the collaborating universities are not relevant to explaining academic SC, while disparities in ages and international vocation affect SC. With regard to economic proximity, differences in GDP are not relevant, while differences in financial funding suggest a stronger rate of collaboration among universities with different levels of funding. Building on our results, we provide some policy implications.

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Notes

  1. The period of time used in our econometric model is limited to 2006–2010 since we used collaborations in the preceding period, 2001–2005, as independent variable to assess previous relationships among academic actors (social proximity).

  2. Descriptive data include information obtained for previous empirical studies corresponding to a total of 43 Spanish university institutions and their corresponding collaborations with the rest of EU-15 institutions except for France and Denmark (not available data in the EUMIDA dataset).

  3. Publications have been classified into 12 scientific disciplines following Tijssen and van Leeuwen (2003) and Torres-Salinas et al. (2011), again using the full counting method for those publications included in journals related to more than one discipline.

    The 12 scientific disciplines are as follows: Agricultural and Food sciences; Chemistry and Chemical Engineering; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Engineering, Information and Communication Technologies, Life Sciences and Biology, Materials Science Mathematics, Medicine, Biomedicine and Health Sciences, Multidisciplinary Sciences, Pharmacology and Physics and Astronomy.

  4. We provide the adjacency matrix on cognitive distance as electronic supplementary material to this article.

  5. In the Spanish case these territorial units represent administrative and policy authorities (Tojeiro-Rivero and Moreno 2019).

  6. Note that yearly data on university funding was not available to the authors. We could only access Funding information related to year 2008. Therefore, distance in funding is calculated based on information from 2008.

  7. LR test alpha confirmed better results for NB than the Poisson model.

  8. Note that Spain accounts for 47 public universities. To ensure the universities had enough time to foster scientific activity and collaborations with other universities, four universities were removed because they were founded after 1997.

  9. As mentioned above, we display data from 43 out of 47 public Spanish universities.

  10. We indicate in parentheses the autonomous community or region where the university is located.

  11. Convergence regions are those included in the “2006/595/EC: Commission Decision of 4 August 2006 drawing up the list of regions eligible for funding from the Structural Funds under the Convergence objective for the period 2007–2013” (published in the Official Journal of the European Union and notified under document number C(2006) 3475). Table 11 included in the "Appendix" of this manuscript identifies Spanish universities in our sample located at convergence regions.

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  1. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales de Cádiz, Universidad de Cádiz, C/Enrique, Villegas Vélez, 2, 11002, Cádiz, Spain

    Ana Fernández, Esther Ferrándiz & M. Dolores León

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  1. Ana Fernández
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Table 11 Universities located in convergence regions
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Fernández, A., Ferrándiz, E. & León, M.D. Are organizational and economic proximity driving factors of scientific collaboration? Evidence from Spanish universities, 2001–2010. Scientometrics 126, 579–602 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03748-3

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