Over the past two decades, economic and political forces worked together to increase the amount and intensity of cooperative research activity in the U.S. A sizable literature, attempting to classify, document, monitor, analyze, and evaluate these activities, has also appeared, as outputs from research sponsored by federal agencies and foundations. To date there has been no significant effort to perform a critical synthesis of this literature from and analytical, policy-oriented perspective. This project will begin to address this need. To make the initial effort manageable, the review will be restricted to empirical studies based on original or archival data, rather than theoretical, normative, or policy analyses; studies of research cooperation among U.S. institutions; published or at least readily available reports and studies; and materials published or printed in the last ten years. The primary purpose is to extract from the empirical literature a set of policy-relevant results based on multiple studies using different methodologies or measures. The investigators will prepare structured summaries of all the studies that meet the criteria for inclusion. These will comprise an electronic data base that can be accessed via keywords, and will be one of the primary outputs from the study. The results will also include a critical synthesis of the literature on cooperative research in the U.S., organized around policy questions of interest to both the policy and research communities. The review will address methodological and measurement issues and produce a set of conclusions about what has been learned from the studies collectively, what level of confidence can be placed on each conclusion, and why.
