Building research capacity in forest science has been recognized internationally as important in order to produce a sound evidence basis for decision-making in policy and practice, even if there is currently little evidence on how to measure and consequently spread progress and innovations resulting from forest research, especially in a fragmented region such as the Mediterranean. The paper aims at establishing a framework from 79 institutions undertaking forest research across thirteen Mediterranean countries for measuring their research capacities and the potential they reached to disseminate results and innovations in forest research. The methodology adopted makes use of common indicators thereby allowing comparisons across countries as regards the following: (i) research lines performed in forest research, (ii) budget generated by forest projects, (iii) overall full budget spent for forest research, (iv) number of forest projects implemented, (v) number of total researchers, permanent staff and non-permanent staff deployed in forest research, and (vi) ISI papers published in forest subjects. Forest research capacities have tentatively been clustered to find similarities or dissimilarities across countries, in order to identify possible partnerships to be reached and to highlight causal indicators that affected the clustering. The paper findings contribute to address how capacity for forest research in the Mediterranean area is developed and how to measure and evaluate the performances of research and innovation systems. They provided further contributions to existing debates in the literature in order to foster research collaboration in the forest sector, knowledge mobilization, innovation and proposals/policies for a common research framework in the European forest sector.