International collaboration in research: Insights from pharmaceutical multinationals (data and graphs)

This article aims to identify the scope and intensity of international collaboration in research conducted by multinational firms in the pharmaceutical sector, before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and to investigate the key factors that determine the impact of scientific publications. We focus on two large multinational enterprises (MNEs) that are inventors of vaccines against the COVID-19 virus, namely AstraZeneca and Pfizer. Using bibliometric methods, a sample of 392 peer-reviewed scientific articles published jointly by the authors from AstraZeneca and Pfizer has been selected from the Scopus database and used as a proxy for the joint collaborative R&D efforts. We show that research collaboration between competing pharmaceutical multinationals has intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, and their R&D relations have moved towards so-called “coopetition.” Based on a regression model that explains the impact of joint research measured by the number of citations, we found citation increases associated with the article’s type (review article), the affiliation country of the first author (primarily the United States), the affiliation type of the first author (academic institution), and country-level affiliation diversity (post-pandemic only). Universities were shown to be able, in certain circumstances, to help legitimize the results for the broader academic audience.