Does university–industry–government collaboration in research gets higher citation and altmetric impact? A case study from India

Collaboration in scientific research is believed to produce more useful and impactful research. The collaboration may involve multiple researchers from one institution or researchers from different institutions. Many times, such collaborations involve institutions belonging to different categories (say University, Industry or Government). This paper attempts to analyse the University–Industry–Government collaboration in research to find out whether such collaborated research outputs attract higher bibliometric and altmetric impact. Research output data of Indian institutions for the period 2010–2018 obtained from Web of Science database is used to demonstrate the analysis. The institutions are programmatically and manually tagged into one of the three categories (University, Industry or Government) depending on their type, and the research output involving different kinds of collaboration are identified and analysed. The results indicate that research papers involving University–Industry–Government collaboration do not differ significantly in terms of citations as compared to non-collaborated papers. However, an advantage in terms of social media mentions is found for different types of University-Industry-Government collaborated papers. Collaboration between U and I category entities, G and I category entities and the UIG collaboration is seen to get advantage in terms of mentions as compared to papers that do not involve such collaboration. Probable reasons for the observed patterns and implications of the results are discussed towards the end of the paper.