A new tutorial demonstrating how to extract and visualize data about industry collaborations by combining Dimensions data with GRID.

Dimensions uses GRID (the Global Research Identifiers Database) to unambiguously identify research organizations. GRID includes a wealth of data, for example whether an organization has type 'Education' or 'Industry'. This makes it easy to take advantage of these metadata to highlight collaboration patterns between a selected university and other organizations from the industry sector.

The Identifying the Industry Collaborators of an Academic Institution notebook can be adapted to focus on any research organization. Many of us are linked to some university, hence it's quite interesting to explore what the non-academic organizations are that collaborate with our institutions and in what research areas these collaborations occur.

The Dimensions API can be accessed for free for non-commercial research projects.

Example Visualization

For example, see below a Plotly visualization of the industry collaborators for University of Trento, Italy.

Key Insights

This type of analysis can reveal: - Major industry partners: Which companies collaborate most frequently with your institution - Research areas: What fields of study attract industry collaboration - Geographic patterns: Where your industry partners are located - Trends over time: How these collaborations have evolved

How It Works

The notebook uses the Dimensions API to: 1. Query publications from a specific academic institution 2. Filter for co-authored publications involving industry organizations (identified via GRID types) 3. Aggregate collaboration data by organization and research field 4. Create interactive visualizations to explore the patterns

This approach can be valuable for university administrators, research officers, and policy makers who want to understand and strengthen university-industry partnerships.

Try It Yourself

Visit the full tutorial to run the analysis on your own institution or explore different collaboration patterns.