  This work investigates public-private research collaboration between Italian
universities and domestic industry, applying a bibliometric type of approach.
The study is based on an exhaustive listing of all co-authored publications in
international journals that are jointly realized by Italian university
scientists and researchers in the private sector: this listing permits the
development of a national mapping system for public-private collaboration,
which results unique for its extensive and representative character. It is
shown that, in absolute terms, most collaborations occur in medicine and
chemistry, while it is industrial and information engineering which shows the
highest percentage of co-authored articles out of all articles in the field. In
addition, the investigation empirically examines and tests several hypotheses
concerning the qualitative-quantitative impact of collaboration on the
scientific production of individual university researchers. The analyses
demonstrate that university researchers who collaborate with those in the
private sector show research performance that is superior to that of colleagues
who are not involved in such collaboration. But the impact factor of journals
publishing academic articles co-authored by industry is generally lower than
that concerning co-authorships with other entities. Finally, a further specific
elaboration also reveals that publications with public-private co-authorship do
not show a level of multidisciplinarity that is significantly different than
that of other publications.
