New insights on the relationships between geographic and institutional distance in research collaborations: a long period analysis

Abstract

This paper analyses the relationship between institutional and geographic distance in scientific collaborations, evaluating the possible changes when a long period (sixteen years) is taken into consideration and discussing the use of some alternative measures of institutional distance. The main result, obtained by analysing the publications of the Italian biotech firms, is that international publications present an higher institutional distance than national papers, particularly in the early years, while there is no significant difference in institutional distance between regional and extra-regional papers, suggesting that opposite incentives are in action at different geographic scales and in different periods.