University-industry research collaborations in the UK: bibliometric trends

Despite increasing interest amongst policy makers and academics, there have been few attempts at gathering systematic data on the nature and extent of research collaborations between universities and industry. This paper uses joint scientific publications as an indicator of such collaborations in the UK over 20 years. It finds that, although there has been a rapid increase in the volume of university-industry collaborations since the 1980s, the biggest increases were before the major policy measures of the mid-1990s. An important factor would appear to be the growing need for firms, especially non-British firms, to collaborate with leading-edge academic research in promising areas of new technology.