Scientific collaboration in finance does not lead to better quality research

Abstract

The study reports an empirical comparison of quality of collaborative research with the quality of individual research. Quality of a paper is measured by the citation rate over the four years following the year of publication. Papers published in fourteen Finance journals between 1987-1991 are sampled. There is no significant difference between the quality of collaborative and individual research. Decision-makers should hesitate in interpreting collaborative research as a definitive sizn of ability to produce better research.

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

“…To address this concern, the total number of citations for a given article can be identified, say, over a fixed period of four or five years following its year of publication in order to standardize the citation collection period (see Avkiran 1997 andBorokhovich et al 2000). 3 Once again, Mann-Whitney U test rejects all but the fourth null hypothesis at the .000 level of significance.…”

“…For example, only 26.77% of the WoS sample is comprised of single-author articles, as opposed to the much higher 49.80% reported in Avkiran (1997). Thus, the principal motivation for this article is to examine whether collaboration is leading to articles of higher impact, and if so, to what extent.…”

“…An earlier study by Avkiran (1997) with a similar research question arrived at the conclusion that collaboration in Finance does not lead to better quality research, where quality was measured by the citation rate over a four-year period following publication.…”

“…In the current study, we are interested in expanding the analysis to a much larger sample, namely, 6667 articles from Web of Science (WoS) and 5818 articles from Scopus, across twenty-three journals covering the period [2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006][2007]. Although our starting point for selecting journals is different to that of Avkiran (1997), ten of his journals are also on our list.…”

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

“…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.…”