Citation levels and collaboration within library and information science

Abstract

Collaboration is a major research policy objective, but does it deliver higher quality research? This study uses citation analysis to examine the Web of Science (WoS) Information Science & Library Science subject category (IS&LS) to ascertain whether, in general, more highly cited articles are more highly collaborative than other articles. It consists of two investigations. The first investigation is a longitudinal comparison of the degree and proportion of collaboration in five strata of citation; it found that collaboration in the highest four citation strata (all in the most highly cited 22%) increased in unison over time, whereas collaboration in the lowest citation strata (uncited articles) remained low and stable. Given that over 40% of the articles were un-cited, it seems important to take into account the differences found between un-cited articles and relatively highly cited articles when investigating collaboration in IS&LS. The second investigation compares collaboration for 35 influential information scientists; it found that their more highly cited articles on average were not more highly collaborative than their less highly cited articles. In summary, although collaborative research is conducive to high citation in general, collaboration has apparently not tended to be essential to the success of current and former elite information scientists.

Relationship among research collaboration, number of documents and number of citations: a case study in Spanish computer science production in 2000–2009

“…We also computed two measures of collaboration which are generally used in studies of research collaboration (Levitt and Thelwall 2009). These measures are the collaborative rate and the collaborative level.…”

Long term productivity and collaboration in information science

“…Within the social sciences, links have been found between higher citation levels and international collaboration for Brazilian management science (Pereira, Fischer, & Escuder, 2000), library and information science (Levitt & Thelwall, 2009) and economics (Levitt & Thelwall, 2010).…”

Réflexivité et registres d’interdisciplinarité. Une boussole pour la recherche entre natures et sociétés

“…Les efforts d'objectivation se contentent généralement d'approches bibliométriques et n'analysent pas le contenu des articles en profondeur (Prud'homme et al, 2012). L'exemple des trois formes de mesures bibliométriques utilisées pour discerner le degré d'interdisciplinarité d'un article est éloquent : l'identification des différentes disciplines des auteurs en fonction de leur adresse institutionnelle (Qiu, 1992), l'adéquation entre la discipline du ou des auteur(s) et celle(s) dominant la revue (Rinia et al, 2001) ou encore la prise en compte du nombre de sujets ou thématiques associés à un article par les bases de données Web of Science ou Scopus (Levitt et Thelwall, 2009). Enfin, l'approche la plus communément utilisée dans les revues de littérature se limite aux références et aux citations, en considérant l'hypothèse que la diversité des disciplines qui citent un article ou qui sont citées par celui-ci refléte-rait son degré d'interdisciplinarité.…”