Publish or patent: Bibliometric evidence for empirical trade‐offs in national funding strategies

Multivariate linear regression models suggest a trade‐off in allocations of national research and development (R&D). Government funding and spending in the higher education sector encourage publications as a long‐term research benefit. Conversely, other components such as industrial funding and spending in the business sector encourage patenting. Our results help explain why the United States trails the European Union in publications: The focus in the United States is on industrial funding—some 70% of its total R&D investment. Likewise, our results also help explain why the European Union trails the United States in patenting, since its focus on government funding is less effective than industrial funding in predicting triadic patenting. Government funding contributes negatively to patenting in a multiple regression, and this relationship is significant in the case of triadic patenting. We provide new forecasts about the relationships of the United States, the European Union, and China for publishing; these results suggest much later dates for changes than previous forecasts because Chinese growth has been slowing down since 2003. Models for individual countries might be more successful than regression models whose parameters are averaged over a set of countries because nations can be expected to differ historically in terms of the institutional arrangements and funding schemes.