Scientific publications from non-academic sectors and their impact

Universities are not the only institutions that publish scientific papers. In this study we evaluate the production and impact of scientific publications from non-academic and industry sources. Data on countries, including businesses, was collected from Incites® (Clarivate Analytics) including the number of Web of Science Documents, times cited, documents in top 10 and 1% % and their percentages, Open Access (%OA), % DOAJ, % of documents per quartile (%Q1, %Q2, %Q3, %Q4), (Category Normalised Citation Impact) CNCI, Citation Impact, Average Percentile, Impact Relative to the World, as well as percentages of highly cited and hot papers. Supplementary data on countries such as including citing patents and media exposure, was acquired from SciVal®. The number of researchers per million inhabitants, GERD (Gross Domestic Expenditure on Research and Development) per capita and per GDP (Gross Domestic Product), % government financing and % business financing and to look at sectors of the economy. Statistical analyses included correlation (PROC CORR), factorial (PROC FACTOR), cluster (PROC CLUSTER & FASTCLUS) and multivariate regression (PROC REG) using SAS®v9.4 (Statistical Analysis System Institute, Cary, North Carolina). Clusters were formed based on Category Normalised Citation Index. Impact varied by knowledge area. Comparing academic and business fields, we found that business papers had higher impact and higher prominence that academic papers, and were cited more intensively by patents. Most counties that had businesses with high impact were European, but also Australian, American and Canadian.