Previous research on university-industry collaboration in Canada, using mean impact factors as a proxy, concluded that the scientific impact of such research is not inferior to that of university research. Using field-normalized impact factors and citation counts, this paper re-examines the Canadian case. It shows that, when impact factors are field-normalized, university-industry papers are published, on average, in journals with lower impact factors than papers originating from universities only. However, field-normalized citation values reveal the opposite: the average scientific impact of university-industry papers is significantly above that of both university-only papers and industry-only papers. Collaboration with industries is, thus, far from detrimental to the scientific impact of university research and even increases it significantly.
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Lebeau et al. (2008) studied this question.
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