Institutional cooperations in Austrian research: An analysis of shared researchers

TL;DR

This study introduces a network-based framework to analyze shared researcher affiliations in Austria, revealing how geography and sector influence co-affiliation patterns and their impact on organizational research visibility.

Contribution

It develops a scalable, network-based analytical approach to systematically examine the implications of multiple organizational affiliations in research systems.

Findings

Geographical proximity influences co-affiliation formation.

Universities form a dense core of persistent co-affiliations.

Persistent co-affiliations correlate with higher citation impact.

Abstract

Multiple organisational affiliations are an increasingly common feature of research systems, yet their implications for organisational performance had received limited systematic attention. We developed a scalable, network-based analytical framework that represents simultaneous researcher affiliations as relational links between organisations and applied it to bibliometric data from Austria. Using harmonised publication and affiliation metadata, we constructed two complementary co-affiliation networks: a complete network capturing all simultaneous affiliations and a temporally filtered network retaining only organisational pairs that recurred over time. Network regression analyses showed that geographical proximity remained an important determinant of co-affiliation formation, with spatial distance consistently reducing shared appointments. Clear sectoral differences emerged beyond geography. Universities formed a dense and persistent core of co-affiliations, whereas ties involving medical institutions, government, non-profit and private-sector organisations were often short-lived and attenuated under temporal filtering. Among crosssector links, co-affiliations between universities and research institutes were notably resilient, indicating a more structurally embedded form of organisational integration. We assessed the effect of concurrent affiliations on organisational citation impact across organisational types using field- and year-normalised indicators. Research institutes and universities consistently exhibited higher citation impact than organisations from other sectors, and persistent co-affiliations were associated with greater and more stable scientific visibility.