Does government funding have the same impact on academic publications and patents? The case of nanotechnology in Canada

University patenting has become an important research outcome in the past few decades. There has been an increase in the number of faculty patents and individual scientists listed as inventors on patent applications. The effective allocation of funding to universities is of great concern to policymakers. In this paper, we evaluate whether an increase in government funding for academic scientists enhances the performance of researchers in both scientific publications and academic patents or if this merely increases publications in the academic realm. We provide summary statistics from nanotechnology data in Quebec, compare it with other provinces in Canada, and build econometric models of various publication, patenting and grant databases. The analysis illustrates the strong relationship between funding and publication productivity as well as the citation impact of publications. In the light of research performance in patenting activities of academic researchers, this empirical study finds a strong influence on the number of patents. Moreover, increased funding appears to strengthen the citation impact of patents in Quebec, which affects the citation impact of patenting activities.

Mots clés

Nanotechnology, academic publications, academic patents, funding