Mapping research on R&D, innovation and productivity: a study of an academic endeavour

ABSTRACT

This paper accounts for the development of the academic endeavour to determine the firm-level relationship between investments in R&D and productivity. The impact of 28 highly cited publications within this line of study is investigated using a combination of bibliometric techniques and citation function analysis. We show how the attention paid to this line of research broadens and deepens in parallel to the diffusion of innovation as a research theme during 2000s. Our findings also suggest that the attraction of scholarly attention is driven by combination of broadening interest in the central research question under study and boundary-pushing methodological contributions made in the key contributions.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation
• productivity
• R&D
• citation analysis
• bibliometric analysis

JEL classification:

• B21
• B23
• B41
• C38
• D24

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Anders Broström http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0820-2769

Staffan Karlsson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5739-5213

Notes

1. In 1970s and 1980s RIP work, where the research group formed around Zvi Griliches at NBER played a leading role, the central issue was that of understanding and assessing the returns to R&D. The theme of innovation was, as pointed out later, advanced at a later stage and firmly incorporated into the RIP domain e.g. through the CDM study.

2. In 1992, 64% of all papers in the field ‘Business and Economics’ in Web of Science had an abstract, this value increased successively to about 96% in 2012. Before 1992, keyword searches resulted in very few found records.

3. Changes in global paper production is expressed as the proportion of fractionalized papers coming from Europe, North America (US or Canada) or other parts of the world. The fractionalization means that when there are authors from several countries on a paper, each region is credited a fraction of each paper in proportion to the number of addresses to each region.

4. Notably, only a small fraction of the WoS papers identified above include all of the three keywords in their abstract and/or title. For the publication year 2012, 130 such articles can be identified within the Business & Economics field, with an additional 100 articles in the wider WoS database.

5. Note that the EINT journal does not appear in Table 2 since it has not yet been included in the WoS database.

6. In the Web of Science database, journals may be classified in more than one subject field category.

7. These are (1) Setting the stage; (2) Background information; (3) Methodological; (4) Comparative; (5) Argumental, speculative, hypothetical; (6) Documentary; (7) Historical; (8) Casual.

8. Ontological questions about economic realities obviously are central for considerations how economic phenomena should be researched. While not figuring in a methodological context, all citations of an evidential nature can therefore be considered to be relevant for questions about how an issue can or should be researched.

9. This is the sum of rows two and three in Table 4.

10. Citing papers are as before identified through WoS. In order to obtain a larger set of analysable citing papers, we lower the threshold inclusion criteria from 100 WoS citations to 30 for this analysis. Forty-three paper citing Crepón, Duguet, and Mairesse (1998) are identified in this manner.