Patterns of Academic Scientific Collaboration at a Distance: Evidence from Southern European Countries

Abstract

The main objective of this chapter is to examine the trends of academic scientific collaboration (SC) at a distance among public universities located in peripheral countries: Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal. The data to capture scientific collaboration consists of a set of co-authored articles published between 2001 and 2010 by universities located in the mentioned Southern countries, indexed by the Science Citation Index expanded (SCI Expanded) of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) Web of Science (WoS) database. We link this data to institution-level information provided by the EUMIDA dataset. In addition, we retrieved regional data on economic variables from Eurostat. The methodology relies on a descriptive analysis of the evolution of co-publications at different notions of proximity. Our results show a trend toward collaboration over longer distances, although we find heterogeneity by countries and disciplines. Building on our results, we provide some policy implications