Transdisciplinary research: how much is academia heeding the call to work more closely with societal stakeholders such as industry, government, and nonprofits?

Transdisciplinary research, the co-creation of scientific knowledge by multiple stakeholders, is considered essential for addressing major societal problems. Research policy makers and academic leaders frequently call for closer collaboration between academia and societal stakeholders to address the grand challenges of our time. This bibliometric study evaluates progress in collaboration between academia and three societal stakeholders: industry, government, and nonprofit organisations. It analyses the level of co-publishing between academia and these societal stakeholders over the period 2013–2022. We found that research collaboration between academia and all stakeholder types studied grew in absolute terms. However, academia – industry collaboration declined 16% relative to overall academic output while academia – government and academia – nonprofit collaboration grew at roughly the same pace as academic output. Country and field of research breakdowns revealed wide variance. In light of previous work, we consider potential explanations for the gap between policymakers’ aspirations and the real global trends. This study is a useful demonstration of large-scale, quantitative bibliometric techniques for research policymakers to track the impact of decisions related to funding, intellectual property law, and nonprofit support.