Investigating triple helix relationships using URL citations: a case study of the UK West Midlands automobile industry

The growth in the importance of co-operation between universities, industry and government to contemporary research has created a need to understand how cross-sector research collaborations occur in practice. Hence quantitative methods are needed to identify and assess the strength of connections within particular university- industry-government groups. The Web is a free source of timely information about all three sectors and hence should be tested for whether it can deliver relevant information. In this project, the potential use of web URL citations, collected through Google's API, as weak benchmarking indicators to estimate the levels of collaboration between different organisations, is explored through a case study of the automobile industry in the UK West Midlands region. URL citation practices are found to differ, depending on whether the website belongs to an academic, commercial, or governmental organisation. While URL citations may sometimes reflect real-world relationships, most real-world relationships probably do not result in an URL citation, particularly in the commercial sector. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.