The effect of academic consulting on research performance: evidence from five Spanish universities

This paper investigates whether engagement in consulting activities has a significant impact on the research
performance of academic scientists. The study relies on a sample of 1743 individual faculty, from five Spanish
universities, who have been recipients of publicly funded grants or have been principal investigators in activities
contracted by external agents over the period 1999-2004. Our findings show that engaging in consulting activities has an
overall negative impact on the average number of ISI-publications. However, the effect of consulting on the scientific
productivity of academic scientists varies across scientific fields: academic consulting is found to have a negative impact
only in the field of ?Natural and Exact? sciences, while in all other scientific fields, we do not find any significant impact
of academic consulting on scientific productivity.