Does scientists' prosocial fire fuel research collaborations with external partners? The role of research motivations and networking skills

[EN] Recent studies suggest that prosocial motivation increases research interactions between scientists and actors outside a university context. However, these studies have often drawn on conflicting conceptualizations and measurements of prosocial motivation. To provide a systematic analysis of the relationship between prosocial motivation and interaction with external partners, we address two critical aspects. First, we assess the contrasting influence of prosocial, intrinsic, and extrinsic motivations for conducting research on the intensity of joint research with external partners. Second, we investigate the moderating role of networking skills and external partner types, as boundary conditions. We employ data derived from a survey of scientists from Spanish universities and public research organizations. We find that scientists with a strong prosocial research motivation engage more intensively in joint research with external partners compared to intrinsically or extrinsically motivated scientists. We also show that this relationship is enhanced if the scientists have well developed networking skills.