The determinants of research quality in Italy. Empirical evidence using Bibliometric data in the biotech sector

Abstract

Does the collaboration between firms and universities or other research organisations improves the quality of research? Why do firms collaborate with public research organisations? The rising importance of university- industry collaboration over the last twenty years makes this question a relevant one. We therefore analyse the relationships between firms and universities using data on firms’ publications in scientific journals. Among all channels through which the relationships between universities and firms are built, joint scientific publications appear to be an important but yet little explored one, especially as regards Italy. We consider the case of the biotechnology sector in Italy. Our aim is to analyse the behaviour of the firms with respect to publications and innovation, in order to shed new insights on the peculiarities of the Italian innovation system and the possible policy implications. For this purpose we built a database of all scientific publications of Italian biotechnology firms over the period 1990 to 2006 and we provide evidence on the institutional and geographic nature of publication networks and on the determinants of research quality. We find that the collaboration with universities and international partners, especially if the research networks are large and varied, increases the research quality. We also begun to collect data on firm size from 1997 to 2006, in order to confront them with the data on publications: our preliminary analysis shows that larger firms have a higher propensity to publish, however small (but not micro) firms publish very high quality papers