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. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.