Abstract
Researchers holding multiple affiliations can play an important bridging role between organizations, fostering knowledge transfer and research collaboration. We propose a methodology to identify authors with multiple affiliations co-hosted by two organizations for a prolonged period of time, which distinguishes them from authors who change jobs or only hold short appointments. We apply this methodology to all authors and organizations residing in the Netherlands and find 626 organizations with at least one co-affiliated researcher. We perform a regression analysis of the inter-organizational network spanned by all co-affiliated researchers, and find strong negative effects of travel time. We also find that researchers who hold multiple affiliations, often cross the institutional boundaries between university, industry, government, healthcare and public research organizations. In particular, university-affiliated researchers tend to be most active in bridging to organizations in other institutional spheres. We end with some reflections for future studies and implications for science policy.
Highlights
Research collaboration is a salient feature of contemporary science
Research collaboration is generally approached from the angle of collaboration among researchers in team science
We develop a systematic methodology to identify researchers with multiple affiliations from bibliometric data and apply a proximity framework to analyze empirically the drivers underlying inter-organizational collaborations spanned by researchers with multiple affiliations
Summary
Research collaboration is a salient feature of contemporary science. Its study led to a vast literature covering various research traditions, all interested in unravelling patterns of collaboration in scientific research (for a recent review, see Hall et al [1]). Research collaboration generates benefits in several ways, inter alia, through sharing of data, resources, equipment and ideas as well as wider exposure of research outcomes to multiple audiences [2, 3]. For these reasons, nurturing research collaboration has always been high on science policy agendas, not just at national levels, and at transnational levels such as the European Union and beyond [4, 5]. If inter-organizational collaboration would only involve researchers tied to a single organization, the interorganizational analysis of collaboration would be the logical complement of the intraorganizational analysis of team science. Organizations connect in other ways, notably, by employing the same individual holding multiple affiliations
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