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Publish or Patent:
Bibliometric evidence for empirical trade-offs in national funding
strategies

Authors: Robert D. Shelton, Loet Leydesdorff
(Submitted on 15 Feb 2011; at http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.3047 )

Abstract: Multivariate linear regression models suggest a trade-off in
allocations of national R&D investments. Government funding, and spending in
the higher education sector, seem to encourage publications, whereas other
components such as industrial funding, and spending in the business sector,
encourage patenting. Our results help explain why the US trails the EU in
publications, because of its focus on industrial funding - some 70% of its
total R&D investment. Conversely, it also helps explain why the EU trails
the US in patenting. Government funding is indicated as a negative incentive
to high-quality patenting. The models here can also be used to predict an
output indicator for a country, once the appropriate input indicator is
known. This usually is done within a dataset for a single year, but the
process can be extended to predict outputs a few years into the future, if
reasonable forecasts can be made of the input indicators. We provide new
forecasts about the further relationships of the US, the EU-27, and the PRC
in the case of publishing. Models for individual countries may be more
successful, however, than regression models whose parameters are averaged
over a set of countries.


________________________________________
Loet Leydesdorff
Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam.
Tel. +31-20-525 6598; fax: +31-842239111
[log in to unmask] ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/
Visiting Professor, ISTIC, Beijing; Honorary Fellow, SPRU, University of
Sussex

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