Evaluation de l'incidence du financement public de la recherche universitaire quebecoise dans le domaine de la biotechnologie

This study focuses on the impact of public and private financing of academic research in the Quebec biotechnology sector. Prior research analyzes the economic impact of university-industry-government collaborations but fewer studies are concerned with the initial funding and the resulting evolution of knowledge creation and dispersion by researchers. Using the information contained in Elsevier's Scopus scientific articles database and the Quebec Systeme d'information sur la recherche universitaire (SIRU) which gives a detailed account of grants and contracts obtained by each researcher, we build a database of the funding received by individual academic researchers and their scientific publications. The selection criterion for an article to be extracted is that at least one Canadian scientist is a co-author. Using co-authorship links, we create the network of individual scientists for the period 1985-2005 with the help of custom built software whose purpose is to automate the complex integration of our multiple data sources and generate an analysis matrix. Following the network construction, we propose a time-related model of the impact of academic R&D financing and network structure on research output measured by the number of papers. Results suggest that individual funding has a positive effect on research output and that funding categorization is crucial in understanding the impacts on scientific publications. The increasing number of papers published today can be better explained by the contracts received in the past 3 years horizon and by the grants received in the past 5 years horizon. The university environment seems to have a specific effect on the level of research output for the biotechnology sector.