The effect of scholar collaboration on impact and quality of academic papers

Abstract

We study how scholar collaboration varies across disciplines in science, social science, arts and humanities and the effects of author collaboration on impact and quality of co-authored papers. Impact is measured with the aid of citations collected by papers, while quality is determined by the judgements expressed by peer reviewers. To this end, we take advantage of the dataset provided by the first-ever national research assessment exercise of Italian universities, which involved 20 disciplinary areas, 102 research structures, 18500 research products, and 6661 peer reviewers. Collaboration intensity neatly varies across disciplines: it is inescapable is most sciences and negligible in most humanities. We measured a general positive association between the cardinality of the author set of a paper and the citational impact and peer quality of the contribution. The correlation is stronger when the affiliations of authors are heterogeneous. There exist, however, notable and interesting counter-examples.

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.…”

“…For example, a study using the whole of WoS, which is dominated by the sciences, found a general trend for articles with more co-authors to have higher mean citation counts (Costas & van Bochove, 2012). Similarly, a study of a sample of Italian articles, from a variety of areas of scholarship, found more highly authored articles to be both more highly cited and more highly rated by peer reviewers (Franceschet & Costantini, 2010). At the level of individual scientific subjects, each additional author, to a maximum of 7 authors, increases the average number of citations per article in biomedical research, chemistry and mathematics (Glänzel, 2002).…”

“…Gazni and Didegah (2011), in an investigation of WoS articles with at least one author affiliated with Harvard University, found a significant positive correlation between the number of co-authors and the number of citations. Franceschet & Costantini (2010), in an investigation of 970 Italian economics and statistics articles, found that the citation level increased as the number of authors increased from 1 to 2 and from 2 to 3 or more. Didegah and Thelwall (2013), in a study of nanotechnology articles, found that the number of authors was not a significant determinant of citations once other factors, such as various types of internationality, were taken into account.…”

Trends in research and collaboration in the Canadian Model Forest Network, 1993–2010

“…In their study on 20 university disciplinary areas, Franceschet and Costantini (2010) have shown that collaborative papers have a greater impact and are more valued by peer experts. Further, they found that both the impact and quality of papers are further enhanced when the author affiliations are heterogeneous.…”

Rebooting science? Implications of science 2.0 main trends for scientific method and research institutions

“…Still, there are some proved incentives for sharing the research outcomes on the web, e.g. higher citation impact of papers (Franceschet & Costantini, 2010). Compared to the traditional scientific dialogue within articles (Groth & Gurney, 2010) where most citations to publications occur after 3 years (often behind the paywall) and diminish after 10 years, the online conversation has the advantage of being more responsive and as well as more open to outsiders.…”