Public–private interactions reflected through the funding acknowledgements

Abstract

Partnership between the public and private sectors has been studied using different methodologies; among them, scientific articles offer an objective way to quantify and assess some of these public---private interactions. The present paper takes advantage of the funding acknowledgements (FA) section included in WoS articles written in English and studies some features of the funded research, such as impact and collaboration. For this purpose, articles with Spain in the address field are selected and retrieved (years 2008---2013), dividing them in two sets: articles with or without FA. Besides, given the large volume of items, the study is focused on groups of articles of each area selected by stratified random sampling. Additionally, those items with a FA section are analysed to identify three types of funding sources: only public, only private, or both sectors. The results show differences between areas in terms of presence of FA and types of funding sectors. On the one hand, in general, articles funded by both the public and private sectors present the best impact, as well as the highest number of authors and organisations. On the other hand, there are important variations in impact and collaboration between areas depending on types of funding sectors. Thus, items funded by both the public and private sectors show the highest significant impact in Clinical Medicine, Life Sciences and Physics, having also greater international collaboration, in most areas, than articles funded only by the public sector. Finally, some limitations of this study are identified and some recommendations for funders and authors are offered.