Collaboration between researchers from academic and non-academic organisations

Throughout the reform process of the European university system, the importance of collaboration between actors at the academy and other areas of the economy and society are ever increasing, as evidenced by a growing number of co-authored articles and the number of citations to such works.This article analyses the characteristics of publications co-authored by Hungarian university researchers with non-academic partners. Scientometric indicators are used as primary methodological tools. Our sample was the publication output of 12 universities, which covers 90% of the university sphere’s publications, between 2001 and 2005 and was taken from the publications of Hungarian institutions of higher education appearing in the Web of Science database. The authors employed a new, important aspect in the cooperation activity of Hungarian universities: their connection with the non-academic partners. The selection and the institutional location of the co-authors resulted in an important database for further analysis. Based on the empirical analysis of the publication and citation performance data of 12 such universities the authors concluded that the proportion of citations to publications co-authored with either academic or non-academic partners is significantly higher for international partners than it is for Hungarian ones. For one publication, the proportion of citations to articles co-authored with foreign non-academic partners, such as firms or health care institutions, was five times higher than the number relating to papers co-authored with Hungarian firms or health care institutions. Higher citedness of the joint articles with the foreign country institutes than domestic partners are in harmony with observation in other countries. Generally the rate of the co-authored articles with non-academic partners is rather low. However it scatters to a great extent concerning the different universities. The presence or absence of medicine in the profile of the universities seems an important factor of that difference.