Exploring the knowledge space: How national research portfolios evolve over time and space

Abstract

Knowledge creation is argued to be one of the most important activities of todays knowledge based societies. Fact is that knowledge creation and accumulation is remarkably variable across space and time, and concentrated in relatively few places. Many researchers have studied and tried to explain this variance in the differing ability of countries to develop innovative knowledge and competitive advantage, but still a lot is unknown about the characteristics of the conceptual scientific knowledge space. This research aims to explore trends and correlations in variance of national research portfolios, differences in growth rates of scientific disciplines and connect those to enabling factors and economic impacts. This was done with an explorative quantitative research design, performing analyses with publication data from SCImago JR and additional economic and governance data. Specific correlations were tested using panel linear model regression models with fixed effects to isolate the effect of country and year omitted variables. It was found that distinguishing research portfolios in terms of knowledge complexity, diversity, specialization, unrelated and related diversification and various other characteristics can help to understand knowledge development variations and trends. Knowledge complexity can be linked to stages in economic development. Furthermore the role of internal dynamics of scientific disciplines was confirmed as systematic differences exist in their development and occurrence in the portfolios or different types of countries. Lastly the results provide interesting insights in the role of governance quality and institutions in determining growth potential and as enabling or restricting contextual factors. The findings confirm that general notions from theories on knowledge development also apply in national research trends, such as related diversification and path dependence. Furthermore similarities are found with the literature on economic complexity and varieties of capitalism. Exploring knowledge development through the networked character of publication data proves to provide theoretically interesting results, leads for future research and societally relevant insights.