The Netherlands’ Eindhoven University of Technology has topped a list of the universities that have co-authored the most papers with the world’s most innovative organisations.

The Dutch institution published 1,316 papers with the top 25 companies that feature in Clarivate Analytics’ list of the Top 100 Global Innovators – almost a quarter more than Harvard University, which takes second place in the university table.

However, Harvard comes out ahead on the citation impact of these papers, with a score of 3.71 (compared with a world average of 1.0).

US universities dominate the table from Clarivate Analytics, with 14 institutions featured. The Netherlands has four representatives, Japan has two, and France, England, mainland China, Canada and Belgium each have one.

Several of the institutions are located near or have links to one or several of the companies in the innovation list.

For example, Dutch technology company Philips was founded in Eindhoven in 1891 (Eindhoven University of Technology); Sony and Hitachi are based in Tokyo (University of Tokyo); 3M is headquartered in Minnesota (University of Minnesota); Dow Chemical is based in Michigan (University of Michigan); and Thales Group is situated just outside Paris (University Paris-Saclay).

The ranking is based on the papers featured in Clarivate Analytics’ (formerly Thomson Reuters Intellectual Property & Science) Web of Science database between 1980 and the present day, with metrics calculated in the InCites platform.

The citation impact is calculated by dividing the actual number of cited papers by the expected citation rate for documents of the same type, year of publication and subject area.

The Top 100 Global Innovators list was produced by analysing patent and citation data in terms of volume, success, globalisation and influence.

Times Higher Education will hold its first Innovation and Impact Summit in partnership with the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) in May and June 2017.

Universities that have published the most research with innovative firms

ellie.bothwell@tesglobal.com