Large publishing consortia produce higher citation impact research but coauthor contributions are hard to evaluate

Abstract

This paper introduces a simple agglomerative clustering method to identify large publishing consortia with at least 20 authors and 80% shared authorship between articles. Based on Scopus journal articles 1996-2018, under these criteria, nearly all (88%) of the large consortia published research with citation impact above the world average, with the exceptions being mainly the newer consortia for which average citation counts are unreliable. On average, consortium research had almost double (1.95) the world average citation impact on the log scale used (Mean Normalised Log Citation Score). At least partial alphabetical author ordering was the norm in most consortia. The 250 largest consortia were for nuclear physics and astronomy around expensive equipment, and for predominantly health-related issues in genomics, medicine, public health, microbiology and neuropsychology. For the health-related issues, except for the first and last few authors, authorship seem to primary indicate contributions to the shared project infrastructure necessary to gather the raw data. It is impossible for research evaluators to identify the contributions of individual authors in the huge alphabetical consortia of physics and astronomy, and problematic for the middle and end authors of health-related consortia. For small scale evaluations, authorship contribution statements could be used, when available.

Preprints as accelerator of scholarly communication: An empirical analysis in Mathematics

“…To deal with the problem, Scopus Author Identifier (Scopus author ID), a unique number assigned automatically to each author in Scopus to group together all of the documents written by that author, are used to retrieve authors' publication histories in Scopus. The recall and precision of the Scopus author ID has been verified to be high by multiple researchers (Kawashima & Tomizawa, 2015;Moed, Aisati, & Plume, 2013) and has been successfully used in order to identify the first recorded publication in Scopus for authors of bioRxiv-deposited papers (Fraser et al, 2020) and identify authors of large publishing consortia (Thelwall, 2020). In consider that our datasets have a high coverage in Scopus (95.72% arXiv papers and 86.28% non-OA papers are also indexed in Scopus) and the wellperformance of results of the author name disambiguation method used by Scopus, the Scopus author ID is prioritized to be used as a trade-off between data availability and processing times (Tekles & Bornmann, 2019).…”

Domestic researchers with longer careers generate higher average citation impact but it does not increase over time

“…For example, one CERN paper had 5,154 coauthors and including this one paper may create thousands of extra authors, altering country profiles. Similarly, many long-term collaborations with almost identical lists of hundreds or a thousand of authors for a series of papers (Thelwall, 2020) could substantially influence the results here with large numbers of additional authors for some countries. The ten-author threshold is relatively arbitrary, designed to exclude highly co-authoring researchers without excluding too many others.…”

“…The publishing authors were excluded as well as the article to avoid unfairly ignoring the best articles of a researcher. It is difficult to evaluate the collaborations of researchers in large co-authorship lists partly because they may be from consortia with publishing agreements ensuring that people with no connection to a study become co-authors (Thelwall, 2020). For example, one CERN paper had 5,154 coauthors and including this one paper may create thousands of extra authors, altering country profiles.…”

Gender gaps in research productivity and recognition among elite scientists in the U.S., Canada, and South Africa

“…Overtime, the growing prevalence of ‘Big Science’ has had an impact on the dynamics of recognition in many disciplines. Scientists connected to large scale research consortia tend to reap the benefits of higher citation rates, although authorship contributions become increasingly difficult to assess [ 41 , 42 ]. Nonetheless, the principle of cumulative advantage has been a dominant theme in the studies of stratification in science.…”