Academic careers and research collaboration: the role of job mobility and scientific excellence

Abstract

Scientific research collaborations are attracting increasing interest from both academia and policy in terms of their potential to contribute to scientific progress. In particular, special attention has been placed on two research collaboration practices: cross-sectoral research collaborations and cross-disciplinary research collaborations. Despite the numerous policy initiatives to stimulate these two modes of scientific research organisation, scientists exhibit dramatic differences in their collaborative patterns to organise research, and in their attitudes to form these types of partnerships. This study takes a Scientific and Technical Human Capital (S&T human capital) approach to examine the influence of two characteristics of research careers that are likely to influence scientists’ engagement in cross-sectoral and cross-disciplinary collaborations. S&T human capital is the sum of skills, knowledge and social relations needed to participate in science (Bozeman & Corley, 2004). A researcher’s S&T human capital is constantly evolving throughout her professional life cycle (Bozeman, 2008). We consider here two career characteristics that are likely to affect this evolution substantially: inter-sectoral job mobility and scientific excellence measured in terms of publication productivity. We examine data from 1593 employed at CSIC - the Spanish National Research Council – who responded to a survey conducted in 2011 covering all fields of science. The resulting dataset includes 285 CSIC researches who declared professional experience in industry, 157 CSIC researchers with previous experience in other non research oriented governmental organisations, and 396 who had professional experience in either of the two former sectors. Additionally, we use respondents’ publication records to distinguish individuals with high publication productivity. We examine the influence of excellence and mobility career backgrounds on the development of cross-sectoral and cross-disciplinary collaborations.