The effect of collaborators on institutions’ scientific impact

The effect of collaborators on institutions scientific impact was examined for 81 institutions with different degrees of impact and collaboration. Not only collaborators including both core and peripheral collaborators cite each other more than non-collaborators, but also the first group cites each other faster than the second group even when self-citations were ignored. Although high impact institutions and more collaborative institutions receive more citations from their collaborators, it seems that the number of these citations increases only up to a certain point. In this regard, for example, there is a slight difference between top and middle collaborative institutions; however, only a small fraction of collaborators do not cite back the papers of these two groups of institutions. The benefit of collaboration varies based on the type of collaborators, institutions, papers, citers and the publication year of cited documents. For example, the effect of collaboration decreases as the institutions level of impact increases. Hence, collaborating more does not directly imply obtaining higher impact

Scientific Impact of Islamic Nations

This article has attempted to present a clear image of science production by the member states of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) based on the Essential Science Indicators (ESI). ESI indexes the most effective science productions of the world. The World Bank, on the other hand, has classified the countries of the world according to their economic position. Using the information accessible in these two sources, we examined the science production of each economic class, and then made a comparison between the Islamic and non-Islamic countries. The economic classes comprise the low-income, the lower middle-income, the upper middle-income, and the high-income nations. Our primary objective was to compare and contrast Islamic Countries versus the other countries of the world to show the status of their current scientific publications. Four major features characterize the statistical analysis of our study: population, economic class, citations, and publications in 22 disciplines and all fields of study as indexed in ESI

The effect of collaborators on institutions' scientific impact

The effect of collaborators on institutions scientific impact was examined for 81 institutions with different degrees of impact and collaboration. Not only collaborators including both core and peripheral collaborators cite each other more than non-collaborators, but also the first group cites each other faster than the second group even when self-citations were ignored. Although high impact institutions and more collaborative institutions receive more citations from their collaborators, it seems that the number of these citations increases only up to a certain point. In this regard, for example, there is a slight difference between top and middle collaborative institutions; however, only a small fraction of collaborators do not cite back the papers of these two groups of institutions. The benefit of collaboration varies based on the type of collaborators, institutions, papers, citers and the publication year of cited documents. For example, the effect of collaboration decreases as the institutions level of impact increases. Hence, collaborating more does not directly imply obtaining higher impact

Relationship among research collaboration, number of documents and number of citations. A case study in Spanish computer science production in 2000-2009.

This paper analyzes the relationship among research collaboration, number of documents and number of citations of computer science research activity. It analyzes the number of documents and citations and how they vary by number of authors. They are also analyzed (according to author set cardinality) under different circumstances, that is, when documents are written in different types of collaboration, when documents are published in different document types, when documents are published in different computer science subdisciplines, and, finally, when documents are published by journals with different impact factor quartiles. To investigate the above relationships, this paper analyzes the publications listed in the Web of Science and produced by active Spanish university professors between 2000 and 2009, working in the computer science field. Analyzing all documents, we show that the highest percentage of documents are published by three authors, whereas single-authored documents account for the lowest percentage. By number of citations, there is no positive association between the author cardinality and citation impact. Statistical tests show that documents written by two authors receive more citations per document and year than documents published by more authors. In contrast, results do not show statistically significant differences between documents published by two authors and one author. The research findings suggest that international collaboration results on average in publications with higher citation rates than national and institutional collaborations. We also find differences regarding citation rates between journals and conferences, across different computer science subdisciplines and journal quartiles as expected. Finally, our impression is that the collaborative level (number of authors per document) will increase in the coming years, and documents published by three or four authors will be the trend in computer science literature

Citations increase with manuscript length, author number, and references cited in ecology journals

Most top impact factor ecology journals indicate a preference or requirement for short manuscripts; some state clearly defined word limits, whereas others indicate a preference for more concise papers. Yet evidence from a variety of academic fields indicates that within journals longer papers are both more positively reviewed by referees and more highly cited. We examine the relationship between citations received and manuscript length, number of authors, and number of references cited for papers published in 32 ecology journals between 2009 and 2012. We find that longer papers, those with more authors, and those that cite more references are cited more. Although paper length, author count, and references cited all positively covary, an increase in each independently predicts an increase in citations received, with estimated relationships positive for all the journals we examined. That all three variables covary positively with citations suggests that papers presenting more and a greater diversity of data and ideas are more impactful. We suggest that the imposition of arbitrary manuscript length limits discourages the publication of more impactful studies. We propose that journals abolish arbitrary word or page limits, avoid declining papers (or requiring shortening) on the basis of length alone (irrespective of content), and adopt the philosophy that papers should be as long as they need to be

Citation count distributions for large monodisciplinary journals

Many different citation-based indicators are used by researchers and research evaluators to help evaluate the impact of scholarly outputs. Although the appropriateness of individual citation indicators depends in part on the statistical properties of citation counts, there is no universally agreed best-fitting statistical distribution against which to check them. The two current leading candidates are the discretised lognormal and the hooked or shifted power law. These have been mainly tested on sets of articles from a single field and year but these collections can include multiple specialisms that might dilute their properties. This article fits statistical distributions to 50 large subject-specific journals in the belief that individual journals can be purer than subject categories and may therefore give clearer findings. The results show that in most cases the discretised lognormal fits significantly better than the hooked power law, reversing previous findings for entire subcategories. This suggests that the discretised lognormal is the more appropriate distribution for modelling pure citation data. Thus, future analytical investigations of the properties of citation indicators can use the lognormal distribution to analyse their basic properties. This article also includes improved software for fitting the hooked power law

Confidence intervals for normalised citation counts: Can they delimit underlying research capability?

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Elsevier in Journal of Informetrics on 24/10/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2017.09.002 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Normalised citation counts are routinely used to assess the average impact of research groups or nations. There is controversy over whether confidence intervals for them are theoretically valid or practically useful. In response, this article introduces the concept of a group’s underlying research capability to produce impactful research. It then investigates whether confidence intervals could delimit the underlying capability of a group in practice. From 123120 confidence interval comparisons for the average citation impact of the national outputs of ten countries within 36 individual large monodisciplinary journals, moderately fewer than 95% of subsequent indicator values fall within 95% confidence intervals from prior years, with the percentage declining over time. This is consistent with confidence intervals effectively delimiting the research capability of a group, although it does not prove that this is the cause of the results. The results are unaffected by whether internationally collaborative articles are included

Not all international collaboration is beneficial: The Mendeley readership and citation impact of biochemical research collaboration

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley Blackwell in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology on 13/05/2015, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23515 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Biochemistry is a highly funded research area that is typified by large research teams and is important for many areas of the life sciences. This article investigates the citation impact and Mendeley readership impact of biochemistry research from 2011 in the Web of Science according to the type of collaboration involved. Negative binomial regression models are used that incorporate, for the first time, the inclusion of specific countries within a team. The results show that, holding other factors constant, larger teams robustly associate with higher impact research, but including additional departments has no effect and adding extra institutions tends to reduce the impact of research. Although international collaboration is apparently not advantageous in general, collaboration with the USA, and perhaps also with some other countries, seems to increase impact. In contrast, collaborations with some other nations associate with lower impact, although both findings could be due to factors such as differing national proportions of excellent researchers. As a methodological implication, simpler statistical models would have found international collaboration to be generally beneficial and so it is important to take into account specific countries when examining collaboration

Long term productivity and collaboration in information science

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in Scientometrics on 02/07/2016, available online: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2061-8 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Funding bodies have tended to encourage collaborative research because it is generally more highly cited than sole author research. But higher mean citation for collaborative articles does not imply collaborative researchers are in general more research productive. This article assesses the extent to which research productivity varies with the number of collaborative partners for long term researchers within three Web of Science subject areas: Information Science & Library Science, Communication and Medical Informatics. When using the whole number counting system, researchers who worked in groups of 2 or 3 were generally the most productive, in terms of producing the most papers and citations. However, when using fractional counting, researchers who worked in groups of 1 or 2 were generally the most productive. The findings need to be interpreted cautiously, however, because authors that produce few academic articles within a field may publish in other fields or leave academia and contribute to society in other ways

Proximity Dimensions and Scientific Collaboration among Academic Institutions in Europe: The Closer, the Better?

The main objective of this paper is to examine the effect of various proximity dimensions (geographical, cognitive, institutional, organizational, social and economic) on academic scientific collaborations (SC). The data to capture SC consists of a set of co-authored articles published between 2006 and 2010 by universities located in EU-15, indexed by the Science Citation Index (SCI Expanded) of the ISI Web of Science database. We link this data to institution-level information provided by the EUMIDA dataset. Our final sample consists of 240,495 co-authored articles from 690 European universities that featured in both datasets. Additionally, we also retrieved data on regional R&D funding from Eurostat. Based on the gravital equation, we estimate several econometrics models using aggregated data from all disciplines as well as separated data for Chemistry & Chemical Engineering, Life Sciences and Physics & Astronomy. Our results provide evidence on the substantial role of geographical, cognitive, institutional, social and economic distance in shaping scientific collaboration, while the effect of organizational proximity seems to be weaker. Some differences on the relevance of these factors arise at discipline level