Co-authored research publications and strategic analysis of public-private collaboration

R&D collaboration between industry and universities has been become an academic research topic in its own right. Public private cooperation is high on many policy agenda's nowadays, especially with regard to science-based technological innovation. Nonetheless, there is still a surprising lack of quantitative data and large-scale systematic measurement. This article presents a series of empirical studies on private-public research cooperation as measured by jointly authored research articles published in international scientific and technical journals. The tens of thousands of public-private co-publications (PPCs) that appear each year in the open scientific literature contain a wealth of information on research cooperation patterns and trends. The institutional address of each co-authoring researcher and the geographic location of their affiliation, provide data for internationally comparative statistics. These macrolevel studies, introducing aggregate-level PPC statistics for countries and European regions, examine pros and cons of PPC analytics to assess the geography of public-private research cooperation. A critical discussion of selected findings is framed within the evaluative context of European Commission policy reports, which have started to apply PPC-based metrics and performance indicators for strategic analysis of science and innovation systems. The conclusions point out that those applications should take into account the varying PPC propensities of research fields and related industrial sectors. Moreover, PPC data seem more appropriate for examining and understanding cooperation patterns at the level of city agglomerations (NUTS3 regions) within Europe than provinces or other aggregates at the NUTS2 level.