5.4 Research Collaboration and Bibliometric Performance

In this chapter, we evaluate the effects of research collaborations on scientific impact, as measured by the Field Weighted Citation Impact indicator.We distinguish collaborations according to their geographic origin (national, international, institutional) and to the affiliation of the researchers (academic and corporate collaborations) and evaluate the importance of each in terms of citation impact. Our main result is that international collaborations significantly improve scientific impact regardless of the research field under consideration. On the other hand, national collaborations positively affect impact only in some fields, while institutional collaborations are found to be either insignificant or detrimental (limited to Health Sciences) to scientific performance.We also find that corporate collaborations are relevant and that their effect grows the higher their share with respect to total publications.