Publish or Patent: Bibliometric evidence for empirical trade-offs in national funding strategies

Multivariate linear regression models suggest a trade-off in allocations of national R&D investments. Government funding, and spending in the higher education sector, seem to encourage publications, whereas other components such as industrial funding, and spending in the business sector, encourage patenting. Our results help explain why the US trails the EU in publications, because of its focus on industrial funding—some 70% of its total R&D investment. Conversely, it also helps explain why the EU trails the US in patenting. Government funding is indicated as a negative incentive to high-quality patenting. The models here can also be used to predict an output indicator for a country, once the appropriate input indicator is known. This usually is done within a dataset for a single year, but the process can be extended to predict outputs a few years into the future, if reasonable forecasts can be made of the input indicators. We provide new forecasts about the further relationships of the US, the EU-27, and the PRC in the case of publishing. Models for individual countries may be more successful, however, than regression models whose parameters are averaged over a set of countries. 1 WTEC, 4600 Fairfax Drive #104, Arlington, VA 22203 USA; [email protected]. 2 Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam, Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam, The Netherlands; [email protected].