Collaboration Effect by Co-Authorship on Academic Citation and Social Attention of Research

Abstract

Academic citation and social attention measure different dimensions of the impact of research results. Both measures do not correlate with each other, and they are influenced by many factors. Among these factors are the field of research, the type of access, and co-authorship. In this study, the increase in the impact due to co-authorship in scientific articles disaggregated by field of research and access type, was quantified. For this, the citations and social attention accumulated until the year 2021 by a total of 244,880 research articles published in the year 2018, were analyzed. The data source was Dimensions.ai, and the units of study were research articles in Economics, History and Archaeology, and Mathematics. As the main results, a small proportion of the articles received a large part of the citations and most of the social attention. Both citations and social attention increased, in general, with the number of co-authors. Thus, the greater the number of co-authors, the greater the probability of being cited in academic articles and mentioned on social media. The advantage in citation and social attention due to collaboration is independent of the access type for the publication. Furthermore, although collaboration with an additional co-author is in general positive in terms of citation and social attention, these positive effects reduce as the number of co-authors increases.

Factors that Influence How Scientific Articles and Reviews are Mentioned on Twitter

“…In this way, the most cited research is not necessarily the one that receives the most social attention. [4] Thus, citation and social attention do not correlate with each other and, therefore, they measure different dimensions in the impact of research results. This is something that has been pointed out in the literature, [7,22] and means that altmetrics might capture diverse forms of impact which are different from citation impact.…”

“…[3] Thus, altmetrics allow knowing how the results of scientific research are perceived and commented beyond academia. [4] Twitter is nowadays the most used social media platform by the general population (and by researchers in particular) to disseminate and comment on the results of scientific research. There are many and varied factors that may influence social media attention of research.…”