Regional and global collaborations for knowledge in German academia

Universities’ role in the research system has undergone a significant change in recent years. Stand-alone strategies are continuously replaced by the pooling of resources and collaborations for knowledge. This is due to a rising complexity of scientific problems in conjunction with scarce budgets and reflects, among others, in an increasing number of co-authored papers, which are in the focus of this study. Based on more than 125,000 articles, the paper presents general trends on the publication activities of German academia between 2000 and 2009 in a first step. Though both, the number of single- and co-authored papers increased rapidly in this period, the rising share of co-authored papers points to the growing importance of collaborations for knowledge. Looking at co-authored papers only, local/regional and interregional/global partnerships seem to be equally important. While this is true for the whole sample, it could be assumed that the geographic distribution of partner differs with the universities’ reputation and orientation. Elite universities, for example, could be expected to publish more and more globally. Before this background the paper scrutinizes specific patterns of different types of universities in a second step. The paper closes with an analysis of spatial proximity as a potential driver for collaborations among partners within a 1000 km circle of each university. Results are twofold. On the one hand, correlation coefficients for all considered partners confirm the generally increasing intensity of cooperation with declining distance. On the other hand, spatial proximity hardly matters for partners with a distance larger than 25 km but smaller than 475 km. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014