Does the higher citation of collaborative research differ from region to region? A case study of Economics

Abstract

Many studies have found that collaborative research is, in general, more highly cited than non-collaborative research. This paper describes an investigation into the extent to which the association between high citation and collaboration for Economics articles published in 2000 varies from region to region and depends on the choice of indicator of citation level. Using data from the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) for 18 countries, 17 American states and four indicators of citation level the citation levels of the collaborative articles are compared with the citation levels of the non-collaborative articles. The main findings are that: (a) for every country and every indicator the mean citation level of the collaborative articles was at least as high as that for the non-collaborative articles, but for five US states and for at least one other indicator the citation level of collaborative articles was lower than that of non-collaborative articles, and (b) the extent to which collaborative articles were more highly cited varied considerably from country to country, from state to state, and from indicator to indicator. This indicates the importance of using multiple indicators when investigating citation advantage since the choice of indicator can change the results.

Long term productivity and collaboration in information science

“…The findings on whole metrics for long term researchers are consistent with the findings of numerous studies for all researchers that have found that citation of articles increases as the number of authors increases (e.g., Herbertz, 1995;Glänzel, 2002;Leimu & Koricheva, 2005;Ma & Guan, 2006;Franceschet & Costantini, 2010;Levitt & Thelwall, 2010;Costas & van Bochove, 2012). This similarity in findings between long term and all researchers tends to suggest that the relationships between productivity and collaboration that apply to long tern researchers could also apply to short-term researchers and, in particular, that our findings may not be substantially different if short term researchers were included in the data.…”

“…Some studies of the social sciences, often using Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) data, have also found statistically significant associations between collaboration in general and citation, including for economics overall, but varied between countries (Levitt & Thelwall, 2010) and for ecology overall, but not for co-authorships within the same institution (Leimu & Koricheva, 2005). From a slightly different perspective, the proportion of the most highly cited library and information science articles that are collaborative has increased over time but the same is not true for uncited articles (Levitt & Thewall, 2009).…”

“…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).…”

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

“…More specifically, each article's total citations can be divided by the number of years following its year of publication up to and including the cut-off year of 2011 (i.e., age) to arrive at an annual mean -reported in Table 2 (e.g., the number of total citations for an article dated 2001 is divided by 10 -ignoring 2012 which is the year of writing this article). Levitt and Thelwall (2010) underscore the importance of using multiple indicators in their cross-country study of higher citation of collaborative Economics articles published in 2000; while the authors report that results can vary considerably between indicators, they also admit that the word 'considerably' is subjective, i.e. no tests of statistical difference are reported.…”

The different flavors of research collaboration: a case study of their influence on university excellence in four world regions

“…Other findings only suggest a weak correlation between international papers and ''highly-cited papers'' except for small countries (Van Leuwen and Tijssen 2007;Glänzel and Schubert 2001;Persson 2010). This indicates that one should be cautious about extrapolating findings from one country to another (Glänzel et al 1999), and even from one region to another region (Levitt and Thelwall 2010).…”