Proximities in research collaboration within biotechnology

Abstract

This research aims to find out the importance of proximity between research collaborators within a science-intensive sector. This research uses the biotechnological field. This is done by using regression analysis on scientometric data from Web of Science and using network analysis tools to analyse the citation impact of publications. There are five different dimensions of proximity distinguished: cognitive, organisational, social, institutional, and geographical. In addition to this, four of these five dimensions of proximity are studied on their relative importance of nearness. This paper shows that for all the dimensions of proximity between the authors of a publication under study, the organisational dimension and the cognitive dimension show a significant relationship to the quality of the research in terms of citation impact.