Research Collaboration and Publication's Citation Impact: Evidence in the Italian Biotech Sector

We analyse research collaboration in the Italian biotechnological sector using bibliometric data. We build a database of all scientific publications of Italian biotechnology firms over the period 1990 to may 2006 and we provide evidence on the institutional and geographical nature of research networks, their evolution and their effects on paper's citations impact. The results indicate that the collaboration with foreign institutions and institutional diversity of collaborators is particularly important for the research quality of Italian biotech firms.