Academic collaboration rates and citation associations vary substantially between countries and fields

Research collaboration is promoted by governments and research funders but if the relative prevalence and merits of collaboration vary internationally different national and disciplinary strategies may be needed to promote it. This study compares the team size and field normalised citation impact of research across all 27 Scopus broad fields in the ten countries with the most journal articles indexed in Scopus 2008-2012. The results show that team size varies substantially by discipline and country, with Japan (4.2) having two thirds more authors per article than the UK (2.5). Solo authorship is rare in China (4%) but common in the UK (27%). Whilst increasing team size associates with higher citation impact in almost all countries and fields, this association is much weaker in China than elsewhere. There are also field differences in the association between citation impact and collaboration. For example, larger team sizes in the Business, Management & Accounting category do not seem to associate with greater research impact, and for China and India, solo authorship associates with higher citation impact. Overall, there are substantial international and field differences in the extent to which researchers collaborate and the extent to which collaboration associates with higher citation impact

Why are co-authored academic articles more cited:Higher quality or larger audience?

This is an accepted manuscript of an article due to be published by Wiley in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Collaboration is encouraged because it is believed to improve academic research, supported by indirect evidence in the form of more co-authored articles being more cited. Nevertheless, this might not reflect quality but increased self-citations or the “audience effect”: citations from increased awareness through multiple author networks. We address this with the first science wide investigation into whether author numbers associate with journal article quality, using expert peer quality judgements for 122,331 articles from the 2014-20 UK national assessment. Spearman correlations between authors numbers and quality scores show moderately strong positive associations (0.2-0.4) in the health, life, and physical sciences, but weak or no positive associations in engineering and social sciences, with weak negative/positive or no association in various arts and humanities, and a possible negative association for decision sciences. This gives the first systematic evidence that greater numbers of authors associates with higher quality journal articles in the majority of academia outside the arts and humanities, at least for the UK. Positive associations between team size and citation counts in areas with little association between team size and quality also show that audience effects or other non-quality factors account for the higher citation rates of co-authored articles in some fields.This study was funded by Research England, Scottish Funding Council, Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, and Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland as part of the Future Research Assessment Programme (https://www.jisc.ac.uk/future-research-assessment-programme)

Analysis of Scientific Collaborations of Iranian Researchers in Blockchain Technology Area

This study aims to analyze the multidimensional scientific collaborations of Iranian researchers in Blockchain technology. For this purpose, the published scientific documents related to Blockchain in international journals were retrieved from two citation databases, Scopus of Elsevier and Web of Science of Clarivate, and used with ScientoPy v2.1.0 bibliography software to integrate and visualize the data with VOSviewer software. We searched databases without limiting the date until September 29, 2021. Researchers in this field indexed 158 records during five years in citation databases and found that the collaboration index equals 3.91. This study depicted Iranian researchers' cooperation patterns in the Blockchain field. The 149 national and international organizations in 43 countries collaborated to publish articles in the Blockchain area with Iranian researchers. The impact of co-authorship with citations rate was analyzed to increase the flow of knowledge between researchers in this field. There was a weak, positive correlation between the two variables, r = .209, N = 152; however, the relationship was significant (p = .010). The number of researchers appears to be associated with the rate of citation. With the results of this study, policy recommendations can be provided for managers and decision-makers in science and technology. The potential benefits of Blockchain technology activists can be used to develop national interests by determining the existing conditions for cooperation between Iranian researchers

Are internationally co-authored journal articles better quality? The UK case 2014-2020

International collaboration is sometimes encouraged in the belief that it generates higher quality research or is more capable of addressing societal problems. In support of this, there is evidence that the journal articles of international teams tend to be more cited than average. Reasons other than the benefits of international collaboration could explain this, however, such as increased national audiences from researcher networks. This article investigates research quality using 148,977 UK-based journal articles with post publication peer review scores from the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF). Based on an ordinal regression model controlling for collaboration, international partners increased the odds of higher quality scores in 27 out of 34 Units of Assessment (UoAs) and all four Main Panels. At the country level, the results suggests that UK collaboration with other advanced economies generates higher quality research, even if the countries produce lower citation impact journal articles than the UK. Conversely, collaborations with weaker economies tend to produce lower quality research, as judged by REF assessors. Overall, the results give the first large scale evidence of when international co-authorship for journal articles is beneficial, at least from a UK perspective, and support the continuation of research policies that promote it

International collaboration and high citation impact – A case analysis of immunology

366-375Bibliometricians emphasize on international collaboration to enhance the citation impact of research publications. However, Mathew Effect for Countries brings out that the citation impact is not uniformly distributed to all country affiliations. The present study explores whether international collaboration helps in neutralizing the origin of country bias. The study explores this with productivity, author affiliation and citation data from Scopus for the immunology papers for the year 2018. The data considered pertain to India and four comparator countries which are high on international collaboration, namely Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The results point to playout of Mathew Effect and possible confirmation of social constructivist argument of citation practices

International collaboration and high citation impact – A case analysis of immunology

Bibliometricians emphasize on international collaboration to enhance the citation impact of research publications. However, Mathew Effect for Countries brings out that the citation impact is not uniformly distributed to all country affiliations. The present study explores whether international collaboration helps in neutralizing the origin of country bias. The study explores this with productivity, author affiliation and citation data from Scopus for the immunology papers for the year 2018. The data considered pertain to India and four comparator countries which are high on international collaboration, namely Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The results point to playout of Mathew Effect and possible confirmation of social constructivist argument of citation practices

Research co-authorship 1900-2020: Continuous, universal, and ongoing expansion

© [in press] The Authors. Published by MIT Press This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence.Research co-authorship is useful to combine different skillsets, especially for applied problems. Whilst it has increased over the last century, it is unclear whether this increase is universal across academic fields and which fields co-author the most and least. In response, this article assesses changes in the rate of journal article co-authorship 1900-2020 for all 27 Scopus broad fields and all 332 Scopus narrow fields. Whilst all broad fields have experienced reasonably continuous growth in co-authorship, in 2020 there were substantial disciplinary differences, from Arts and Humanities (1.3 authors) to Immunology and Microbiology (6 authors). All 332 Scopus narrow fields also experienced an increase in the average number of authors. Immunology and Classics are extreme Scopus narrow fields, as exemplified by 9.6 authors per Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer article, whilst 93% of Trends in Classics articles were solo in 2020. The reason for this large difference seems to be the need for multiple complementary methods in Immunology, making it fundamentally a team science. Finally, the reasonably steady and universal increases in academic co-authorship over 121 years show no sign of slowing, suggesting that ever expanding teams are a central part of current professional science

Is Research Funding Always Beneficial? A Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of UK Research 2014-20

The search for and management of external funding now occupies much valuable researcher time. Whilst funding is essential for some types of research and beneficial for others, it may also constrain academic choice and creativity. Thus, it is important to assess whether it is ever detrimental or unnecessary. Here we investigate whether funded research tends to be higher quality in all fields and for all major research funders. Based on peer review quality scores for 113,877 articles from all fields in the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021, we estimate that there are substantial disciplinary differences in the proportion of funded journal articles, from Theology and Religious Studies (16%+) to Biological Sciences (91%+). The results suggest that funded research is likely to be higher quality overall, for all the largest research funders, and for all fields, even after factoring out research team size. There are differences between funders in the average quality of the research they support, however. Funding seems particularly beneficial in health-related fields. The results do not show cause and effect and do not take into account the amount of funding received but are consistent with funding either improving research quality or being won by high quality researchers or projects. In summary, there are no broad fields of research in which funding is irrelevant, so no fields can afford to ignore it. The results also show that citations are not effective proxies for research quality in the arts and humanities and most social sciences for evaluating research funding