  Examining effectiveness of institutional scientific coalitions can inform
future policies. This is a study on the structure of scientific collaborations
in three cities in central Germany. Since 1995, the three universities of this
region have formed and maintained a coalition which led to the establishment of
an interdisciplinary center in 2012, i.e., German Center for Integrative
Biodiversity Research (iDiv). We investigate whether the impact of the former
coalition is evident in the region's structure of scientific collaborations and
the scientific output of the new center. Using publications data from
1996-2018, we build co-authorship networks and identify the most cohesive
communities in terms of collaboration, and compare them with communities
identified based on publications presented as the scientific outcome of the
coalition and new center on their website. Our results show that despite the
highly cohesive structure of collaborations presented on the coalition website,
there is still much potential to be realized. The newly established center has
bridged the member institutions but not to a particularly strong level. We see
that geographical proximity, collaboration policies, funding, and
organizational structure alone do not ensure prosperous scientific
collaboration structures. When new center's scientific output is compared with
its regional context, observed trends become less conspicuous. Nevertheless,
the level of success the coalition achieved could inform policy makers
regarding other regions' scientific development plans.
