An empirical investigation of the influence of collaboration in Finance on article impact

Abstract

We investigate the impact of collaborative research in academic Finance literature to find out

The influence of co-authorship on article impact in OR/MS/OM and the exchange of knowledge with Finance in the twenty-first century

“…Main findings of this study support the importance of collaboration in publishing high impact articles in OR/MS/OM (a finding recently also established for Finance by Avkiran 2013). However, the marginal gain enjoyed by introducing another author to articles with three or more authors is insignificant.…”

“…Furthermore, as recently reported in Avkiran (2013), who examines the impact of collaboration in Finance, self-citation counts are not necessarily reliable when Web of Science is compared with Scopus. Avkiran (2013) also proceeds with his study without accounting for author self-citations.…”

“…Further support for this choice can be found in Stonebraker et al (2012) who conclude that in Operations Management a larger number of citations emerge in years 3-5 (our choice is the mid-point of this range). Equally relevant, two key articles on influence of collaboration in Finance on article impact also use a four-year citation count (see Avkiran 1997Avkiran , 2013. 1 We download article records covering eight years of publications (2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008) that include data fields such as authors, publication name, publication year, keywords, and cited references, as well as corresponding citations across 2002-2012.…”

“…For this we use the list of nineteen ranked Finance journals used by Currie and Pandher (2011, Table 5), as also used by Avkiran (2013 , Table 1). Currie and Pandher's approach generates a numerical estimate of quality that determines the rank ordering.…”

“…Sonnenwald (2007, p.672) contributes to this discussion with the words, "Scientific collaboration continues to increase in importance because it can uniquely address complex, critical problems." Therefore, it is important to study the influence of collaboration on the impact or quality of research produced -an area of research that has recently been closely examined in Finance (Avkiran 2013) but has not been sufficiently explored in OR/MS/OM despite many studies on journal ranking primarily under the heading of OM. We initially focus on the impact of collaboration in OR/MS/OM and later extend the investigation to exchange of knowledge between OR/MS/OM and Financewith the motivation to understand the potential for knowledge creation.…”