Research Base and Industry-Academia Collaboration in Japanese National Universities: Reproducibility Package

Abstract

This repository provides the reproducibility package for a study examining the relationship between research capacity and industry-academia collaboration activities across Japanese national universities. The study integrates university-level data on newly awarded KAKENHI grants, joint research with industry, patent applications, full-time faculty, and disciplinary research composition. The main analytical period is 2021-2024 and covers 81 harmonized university comparison units. Disciplinary composition was derived from OpenAlex and classified into four broad domains: Life Sciences, Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Health Sciences. For the primary field-adjusted analysis, the 2018-2020 pre-analysis-period disciplinary profile was aggregated across constituent universities using the number of classified publications as weights. The repository includes the analytical panel, institutional crosswalks, publication-weighted and alternative disciplinary profiles, descriptive statistics, correlation results, negative binomial regression outputs, fixed-effects and weighting sensitivity analyses, and data-audit records used in the manuscript. A final data audit corrected institutional mappings in the patent data for Nara National Institute of Higher Education and Research and Institute of Science Tokyo. All affected analytical outputs were regenerated before this release. The main substantive finding is that the positive association between the share of Challenging Research grants and industry-academia collaboration activity is substantially attenuated after adjustment for disciplinary research composition. For patent activity, a weak positive association remains in some model specifications, but its statistical significance varies across sensitivity analyses. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP26K06184.