A Taxonomy of British Corporate Research

A tool to investigate British industrial research through its published output. This site provides a chance to explore the publishing habits of the 290 most published UK companies.

By: J. Sylvan Katz & Diana Hicks

With the assistance of: Danny Birchall & Modesto Vega

Suggested reference: J. S. Katz, D. Hicks, D. Birchall, M. Vega (1997) A Taxonomy of British Corporate Research Available http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/sylvank/best/taxonomy/index.html

Introduction

Between 1981 and 1994, more than 2,600 companies published refereed "academic" journal articles from sites in the UK. They accounted for about 40% of publishing institutions in the UK and participated in eight percent of UK research output (see Collaboration & Diversity in British Research). ICI published more than many universities, and Wellcome, SKB and other pharmaceutical companies published as much as smaller universities.

Why do they publish so much? Industrial research is meant to generate new product and process possibilities. Companies strategically manage their research, surrounding it with secrecy and appropriating results. Thus we expect them to patent not publish. Indeed, companies do not publish all their research. Before a firm publishes research results, they screen the paper and block publication of commercially sensitive information, thus balancing their need for secrecy with open publication. So publications do not reliably indicate the size of R&D efforts.

Yet, firms have a variety of reasons for publishing. Subjecting their research to outside scrutiny helps maintain its quality. Therefore publishing can indicate that firms have an R&D effort that meets national or international quality standards. Firms must obtain regulatory approval for certain products, for example pharmaceuticals and agro-chemicals. Because publishing is part of obtaining approval, it can indicate that a firm is in this sort of business. Firms' publishing also helps build a favourable impression among potential recruits, aiding in hiring high quality scientific and engineering staff. Therefore, publishing indicates that a firm employs scientists and engineers.

Publishing also serves as a sign that the firm possesses technical capability and tacit knowledge in very specific areas (Hicks, 1995). By publishing, the firm signals to the outside world that it possesses capability, enhancing its technical credibility. Credibility enables researchers to join in the barter exchange of knowledge, necessary for almost every firm as self-sufficiency in research is impossible to attain. Technical reputation is also needed to gain new business in project-based industries such as large-scale construction or if firms sell to medical or engineering professionals. It can encourage investment, for example, by indicating pharmaceutical products are in the pipeline. Thus technical credibility based on tacit knowledge - an intangible asset - is indicated by a firm publication. An industrial publication also contribute to publicly available knowledge whose future economic benefit the firm cannot completely control. Other firms may derive economic benefit after reading the papers, and the publishing firm may in turn benefit from the advances of others elaborating on its work.

This site provides a chance to explore the publishing habits of the 290 most published companies. These are the companies:

whose publishing subsidiaries and units together produced 10 or more refereed, "academic", papers
indexed in the Science Citation Index (SCI) database produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia
from 1981 through 1994
from UK addresses

The site allows you to ask questions like:

Which chemical companies published? Answer
Which companies published organic chemistry research? Answer
Which companies in the agriculture chemicals patent category publish? Answer
In which fields did ICI publish? Answer
Which other companies have a publishing profile similar to ICI's? Answer
Which parts of Hanson published? Answer
Why was British Airways publishing? Answer

The database has been constructed using classification schemes for: product sectors, patents, scientific fields, and a taxonomic map. Indeed, even companies are in a sense an ever changing aggregation of units and subsidiaries. Please read the methodology pages to understand how this perspective was constructed. There you will discover why Zeneca is absent and what "health & household" is. Note that the data inevitably portray a historical picture. Since publications are totaled 1981 to 1994, companies that no longer exist can be found. (For example, Searle's UK laboratory was closed.) In addition, parents and subsidiaries were unified using 1992 Who Owns Whom, thus the structure of the companies was frozen in time.

The database can be accessed from five different perspectives. These are explained in the table below.

Explanation Label Relevant part of method section

Identify companies with similar publishing profiles, or companies with unique profiles Taxonomy How was the taxonomy made?

Find out which companies in a product sector publish (>9 papers, 1981-94) Product Sector How were companies classified into product sectors?

Find publishing companies that specialize in a patent class Patent Class Where does the patent information come from?

Find companies publishing in a field Scientific Field How were papers assigned to scientific fields?

Look up the publishing profile of an individual company Company List How were subsidiaries and publishing units collected together under one firm name?

References to related analyses:

This database was drawn from a larger data set developed and analysed in our previous report:

D.M. Hicks and J.S. Katz, The Changing Shape of British Industrial Research, STEEP Special Report No. 6, SPRU, March 1997.

Other analyses drawing on this data set are:

J.S. Katz and D.M. Hicks, "Desktop Scientometrics", Scientometrics, 38 (1) 141-153, January 1997.
D.M. Hicks and J.S. Katz, "Publications: le jeu des signaux", Biofutur, Special Issue 168, 78-79, June 1997.
D.M. Hicks and J.S. Katz, "A national research network viewed from an industrial perspective", Revue Economique Industrielle, 79, 129-142, 1997.

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