Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

This paper aims at assessing the determinants of firms’ scientific production as measured by the publication of scientific papers. As stressed by some previous studies, firms from the private industry tend to publish extensively in the scientific literature. However, up to now few empirical studies have been conducted to assess the determinants of firms’ scientific production. The paper begins with a review of the motives for firms to publish their knowledge in scientific journals. Descriptive statistics provides trends in the output of corporate scientific research. The following empirical analysis covers the 2,000 largest R&D companies over the recent period (2006-2009). The results show that the size of the firm’s R&D as well as collaboration matters for the quantity and the quality of the scientific knowledge produced by the firm.