The strategies of success of leading universities in the emerging field of Bio-economics

This thesis analyses the impact of scientific diversification and specialisation on the success of leading universities in Bio-economics. With the aim to measure and visualise this diversification and the related sophistication in the publication output of Universities and of the universities ranking position. The data has been collected from the research space -Guevara et al., 2016, The QS Top University Ranking and the CTWS Leiden Ranking. Including calculated diversity measures such as variety, balance and disparity, a regression analysis is then computed to study to which extent specialisation, diversification, and collaborations contribute to the success of a university. Adding as robustness check control variables like the GDP of the country of origin or the number of students for each university. In the first analysis, the dependent variable involved is the ranking position and secondly the total number of publications (in terms of citation) of the university is considered. It results that variety of categories has the most substantial effect both on the ranking position and in the publications output. Also, collaborations play a major role in the success of a university. Findings indicate that there is no one solution to be successful and depending on the structure of the university, and the social-economic context universities may adopt different strategies.