Regional research and foreign collaboration

Motivated by the merging of four Swedish counties to a larger administrative and political unit with increased responsibilities, a comprehensive study of regional–foreign research collaboration was carried out. Various multivariate methods were applied for the depiction of collaborative networks of various compositions and at various levels of aggregation. Other aspects investigated concerned the influence of institutions and countries on regional–foreign collaboration and the relation between collaboration and research fields. Findings showed that foreign research collaboration was concentrated to three major regional institutions, each with a characteristic collaborative context. The influence of domestic collaboration was notable with regard to medical research while collaboration within the field of physics and astronomy was characteristic for pure regional–foreign collaboration, which was the dominating type of research collaboration throughout the period of observation (1998–2006).