The Evolution of Corporate Science in Europe: Characterizing Publication Patterns and Scientific Novelty

Abstract

[EN] Corporate Science (CS)—the study of how firms conduct scientific research—has been a growing field of research. Nonetheless, there still persist a significant bias in terms of geographical area, with most studies centering on the U.S. scientific-Industrial complex (Rotolo et al., 2022). Furthermore, there has been little research on the characteristics of the publications themselves, beyond classical citation-based metrics. With our study we aim to first, reduce the geographical gap by characterizing and establishing a set of stylized facts on the evolution and current state of CS in 27 European Union member states, and second we obtain empirical evidence on the degree of novelty displayed by these publications. In order to achieve this, we build a comprehensive dataset of publishing European corporations and match it with their corresponding publications, which we latter enrich with patent and bibliometric data. We aim to contribute to the growing literature of Corporate Science research by providing evidence of whether the apparent decline is a U.S. only phenomenon or a global trend (Arora et al., 2018; Simeth and Raffo, 2013), and discern how European industrial researchers contribute to the scientific community in terms of novelty.