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

Abstract

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.

What drives citations of frontier application publications?

“…The coefficients of Authors , Instit are positively signed. This agrees with existing studies ( Bornmann, 2017 ; Card and DellaVigna, 2017 ; Ronda-Pupo and Katz, 2017 ; Struck et al., 2018 ; Thelwall and Maflahi, 2019 ). The sign, however, diverges with the findings of others ( Maz-Machado and Jimenez-Fanjul, 2018 ; Wongkhae et al., 2017 ).…”

“…Bornmann 2017, Ronda-Pupo and Katz (2017), Struck et al (2018) and Thelwall and Maflahi (2019) found statistically significant positive effects of author collaborations on citation counts in Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus databases across disciplines over the period 1976 and 2012. The modelling included Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), negative binomial and zero-inflated Poisson regressions.…”

“…The modelling included Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), negative binomial and zero-inflated Poisson regressions. Thelwall and Maflahi (2019) noted however, that there are significant cross-country and field dichotomy in the level of cooperation among researchers as well as how collaboration influences citation counts. On the contrary, Maz-Machado and Jimenez-Fanjul (2018) and Wongkhae et al (2017) found negative association between number of authors and journal citation counts in journals with Thomson Reuters impact factor (TRIF).…”

“…Another facet has been the comparison between one-country collaborations and many-country collaborations (Frenken et al, 2005(Frenken et al, , 2010Persson et al, 2004). Bornmann 2017, Leydesdorff et al (2019) and Thelwall and Maflahi (2019) reported significant positive relationship between citations and many-country authorships. These results are similar across models such as OLS, negative binomial and zero-inflated Poisson, with citations measured as counts in WOS or normalised citations.…”

Internationalists and locals: international research collaboration in a resource-poor system

“…As to whether more collaborative scholars are more productive, the evidence is mixed, especially when using fractional counting (Abramo et al 2017), and collaboration rates differ significantly across countries and disciplines (Thelwall and Maflahi 2019;Fox et al 2017). In general, more productive scientists tend to collaborate more with international colleagues, and the most productive or top performers are much more internationalized than their lower-performing colleagues (Kwiek 2019: 23-71).…”