The Impact of Proximities on Scientific Research Collaboration-Evidence from Biotechnological Field in Guangdong Province

This research aims to find out the importance of proximity between research collaborators within a science-intensive sector by using the biotechnological field in Guangdong Province as research object. There are five different dimensions of proximity distinguished: cognitive, organizational, social, institutional, and geographical. Four of these five dimensions of proximity are studied on their relative importance of nearness in this paper. After applying regression analysis on scientometrics data from Web of Science and applying network analysis tools to analyze the citation impact of publications, this paper shows that for all the dimensions of proximity between the authors of a publication under study, the following conclusions can be made:(1)the cognitive proximity shows a reverse U relationship;(2)the organizational and geographical dimensions show positive relationship;(3)the institutional proximity shows a negative relationship to the quality of research in terms of citation impact.