How to interpret the position of private sector institutions in bibliometric rankings of research institutions

Félix Moya-Anegón (), Carmen López-Illescas () and Henk F. Moed ()
Additional contact information
Félix Moya-Anegón: CSIC, CCHS, IPP
Carmen López-Illescas: University of Extremadura
Henk F. Moed: Informetric Research Group, Elsevier

Scientometrics, 2014, vol. 98, issue 1, No 19, 283-298

Abstract: Abstract This paper analyzes the positions of institutions from the private domain in bibliometric rankings of as many as 27,000 research institutions and highlights factors that are crucial for a proper interpretation of such positions. It was found that among the institutions with the largest output in terms of published research articles, private firms are underrepresented, whereas in the top quartile of institutions with the largest citation impact firms are overrepresented. A firm’s publication output is not a good indicator of its R&D investment: big firms in Pharmaceutics are both heavy investors in R&D and frequent publishers of scientific articles, whereas in Automobiles firms tend to invest heavily in R&D but their publication output is low. This is ascribed to the fact that the former need a validation of their results by the scientific community, while the latter do less so. Private institutions generating the largest citation impact tend to collaborate with the best public research institutions. This reflects the crucial importance of publicly funded research for the private sector.

Keywords: Bibliometric rankings; Institutions rankings; Firms research performance; Firms R&D investment; Citation analysis; Research collaboration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-013-1087-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:98:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-013-1087-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-013-1087-4

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().