We analyse inter-regional research collaboration as measured by scientific publications and patents with multiple addresses, covering 1316 NUTS3 regions in 29 European countries. The estimates of gravity equations show the effects of geographical and institutional distance on research collaboration. We also find evidence for the existence of elite structures between excellence regions and between capital regions. The results suggest that current EU science policy to stimulate research collaboration is legitimate, but doubt the compatibility between EU science policy and EU cohesion policy.
The Framework Programmes (FPs) funded by the European Commission support transnational research collaborations in order to make the European Research Area more competitive. Some have raised concerns that the FPs compromise the cohesion policies of the European Commission aimed at reducing income disparities between European regions. We investigate whether existing scientific collaborations between European Union (EU) subnational regions—as captured by co-authored publications—are conducive for acquiring FP funding, and whether FP funding, in turn, stimulates subsequent co-publication activity between pairs of EU regions. Our results indicate that previous co-publication activity only has a minor effect on being funded. We also find that the effect of funding on co-publication activity is especially significant for regional pairs that did not intensively co-publish before participation. The results suggest that the returns to FP funding are highest when involving scientifically lagging regions. In this respect, the current FP policy is in line with cohesion policy.
Background Pharmaceutical trials are mainly initiated by sponsors and investigators in the United States, Western Europe and Japan. However, more and more patients are enrolled in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia. The involvement of patients in new geographical settings raises questions about scientific and ethical integrity, especially when experience with those settings is lacking at the level of trial management. We therefore studied to what extent the geographical shift in patient enrolment is anticipated in the composition of trial management teams using the author nationalities on the primary outcome publication as an indicator of leadership. Methods and Findings We conducted a cohort-study among 1,445 registered trials in www.clinicaltrials.gov that could be matched with a primary outcome publication using clinical trial registry numbers listed in publications. The name of the sponsor and the enrolment countries were extracted from all registrations. The author-addresses of all authors were extracted from the publications. We searched the author-address of all publications to determine whether enrolment countries and sponsors listed on registrations also appeared on a matched publication. Of all sponsors, 80.1% were listed with an author-address on the publication. Of all enrolment countries, 50.3% appeared with an author-address on the publication. The listing of enrolment countries was especially low for industry-funded trials (39.9%) as compared to government (90.4%) and not-for-profit funding (93.7%). We found that listing of enrolment countries in industry-funded trials was higher for traditional research locations such as the United States (98.2%) and Japan (72.0%) as compared to nontraditional research locations such as Poland (27.3%) and Mexico (14.1%). Conclusions Despite patient enrolment efforts, the involvement of researchers from nontraditional locations in trial management as measured by their contribution to manuscript writing is modest. This division of labor has significant implications for the scientific and ethical integrity of global clinical research.
