Which collaborations produce the most high-quality research?

Collaboration is increasingly seen as an important factor in achieving high-quality science, with some of the most impactful research stemming from partnerships that cross geographic, sectoral or social boundaries.

The Nature Index can track collaborations between institutions across some of these boundaries, based on their joint output in journals included in the database. It has now released new data that shows the leading partnerships from the latest 12 months of indexed publications, based on this bilateral collaboration score, the sum of their contributions (Shares) on the papers to which both have contributed.

Some of the highlighted data include the leading collaborations across the corporate and healthcare sectors, and the leading institutions for collaborations involving nations developing their research capacity.

The latter reveals how important some of Europe’s biggest research organizations are to institutions based in nations that are still growing their science sectors. When ranked according to their joint output (Share) with institutions in countries outside the Nature Index top 50, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) (collaborative Share of 244.48), in Geneva, Switzerland, the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) (220.16) in Rome, and the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (150.81) come out on top.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, which is ranked 5th, with a collaborative Share of 98.22, and Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, ranked 7th, with a collaborative Share of 81.92, are the only institutions outside of Europe to appear in the top ten.

To find out which countries/territories fall outside the top 50 in the Nature Index, search the main country/territory table. Cyprus, Slovakia, Uganda, Egypt, Colombia and Kenya are ranked 51 to 56, respectively, for example.

Institutions among these ‘broadening collaborators’ can also be ranked according to the percentage of an institution’s total Share in the database represented by this type of collaboration. For example, this percentage for CERN and INFN are 5.89% and 5.82%, respectively. But when the top 50 institutions are ranked by percentage, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine comes out on top, with 17.68% of its total Share coming from collaborations with countries/territories outside the top 50. Pohang University of Science and Technology, in South Korea, and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in Batavia, Illinois, have the next highest percentages, at 11.79% and 10.69%, respectively.

Cross-sector standouts

The new data reveal cross-sector collaboration trends for institutions, including how much each institution contributes to the partnership.

For collaborations between institutions in the healthcare and corporate sectors, Italy’s Scientific Institute for Research, Hospitalization and Healthcare (IRCCS) and Techint Group, an Italian-Argentine conglomerate specializing in industrial machinery manufacturing, form the most prolific partnership, with a total collaboration score of 14.13. IRCCS contributes 10.79 of that Share.

The IRCCS-Techint Group partnership has more than twice the Share of the second most prolific corporate–healthcare collaboration, between Spain’s IVIRMA Global, which manufactures precision metal components, and La Fe University Hospital in Valencia. Their total collaboration score is 6.07, with IVIRMA Global contributing almost 70% towards the partnership’s output.

Danish hospitals are involved in five of the ten leading healthcare–corporate collaborations in the Nature Index. Four of those collaborations involve Amgen, in California — one of the largest biomedical companies in the United States, by revenue — and one features AstraZeneca, the UK’s largest biomedical company. Denmark’s strong investment in life-sciences research has likely helped it to forge strong partnerships with some of the world’s most prominent companies in the space.

The ten leading corporate–healthcare collaborators are shown below, ranked by total collaboration score (CS):

It is possible to explore other collaboration types in the data by choosing from those highlighted — including leading international academic–academic collaborators, leading corporate collaborators and leading collaborators overall — or by filtering different sectors when browsing the data. The new collaboration views can all be accessed here on the Nature Index website.