Research cooperation within the bio-pharmaceutical industry: Network analyses of co-publications within and between firms

摘要

Bio-pharmaceutical R&D is increasingly an international affair. Research articles published in the peer-reviewed international scientific and technical journals represent quantifiable research outputs of bio-pharmaceutical firms. Large-scale systemic measurements of worldwide trends and sectoral patterns within bio-pharmaceutical science can be gauged from these articles, where co-authored research papers are assumed to reflect research cooperation and associated knowledge flows and exchanges. We focus our attention on the largest science-based multinational enterprises (MNEs), those that produce relatively large quantities of research articles. The study deals with the worldwide output of research articles that are co-produced by corporate researchers during the years 1996-2001. We employ these publications to examine structural factors characterizing research cooperation networks within industry at the level of major geographical regions (North America, Europe, Pacific-Asia), with a breakdown by within-MNE and between-MNE network linkages. The descriptive statistics on publication output and results of network analyses of co-publication linkages not only indicate regional differences, with a central role for US companies in bio-pharmaceutical research, but also a variety of firm-specific research cooperation networks which enabled us to develop a tentative typology of MNEs in terms of their intra- and inter-organizational patterns of research cooperation linkages.