<p>The construction of an efficient national innovation system is beneficial to academic performance of institutes. Institutional diversity and Triple Helix (TH) interactions exhibit distinct characteristics in capturing relationships among universities, industries, and governments (UIG). They are correlated, complementing each other to present a comprehensive performance assessment of these entities. Taking the field of climate change as an example, this study combines micro-institutional collaboration analysis of contract-driven explicit interactions of UIG with macro-systemic evaluation of institutionally-guided implicit synergistic relationships. The participation of different institutions in the climate change research can be measured through the institutional diversity indicator, and the dynamic synergy effects can be explored through the TH indicators among different topics and countries. The results show that both institutional diversity and the synergy effect show initial increase followed by a subsequent decrease, but they are not synchronized. An increase (decrease) in the proportion of single-institutional publications weaken (enhance) the likelihood of various collaboration patterns, consequently eroding (promoting) the TH interactions. The decline in synergy effect is mainly associated with the gradual dominance of the proportion of publications from universities. There are minor disparities in the TH relationship among the different topics and countries because of various research content/national conditions. More diversified cooperation patterns need to be encouraged through relevant policies and practices.</p>