Public-private collaboration and scientific impact: An analysis based on Danish publication data for 1995–2013

In the past few decades, there has been increasing interest in public-private collaboration, which has motivated lengthy discussion of the implications of collaboration in general, and co-authorship in particular, for the scientific impact of research. However, despite this strong interest in the topic, there is little systematic knowledge on the relation between public-private collaboration and citation impact. This paper examines the citation impact of papers involving public-private collaboration in comparison with academic research papers. We examine the role of a variety of factors, such as international collaboration, the number of co-authors, academic disciplines, and whether the research is mainly basic or applied. We first examine citation impact for a comprehensive dataset covering all Web of Science journal articles with at least one Danish author in the period 1995–2013. Thereafter, we examine whether citation impact for individual researchers differs when collaborating with industry compared to work only involving academic researchers, by looking at a fixed group of researchers that have both engaged in public-private collaborations and university-only publications. For national collaboration papers, we find no significant difference in citation impact for public-only and public-private collaborations. For international collaboration, we observe much higher citation impact for papers involving public-private collaboration.