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Heterogeneity of collaboration and its relationship with research impact in a biomedical field

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Abstract

This paper analyses existing trends in the collaborative structure of the Pharmacology and Pharmacy field in Spain and explores its relationship with research impact. The evolution in terms of size of the research community, the typology of collaborative links (national, international) and the scope of the collaboration (size of links, type of partners) are studied by means of different measures based on co-authorship. Growing heterogeneity of collaboration and impact of research are observed over the years. Average journal impact (MNJS) and citation score (MNCS) normalised to world average tend to grow with the number of authors, the number of institutions and collaboration type. Both national and international collaboration show MNJS values above the country’s average, but only internationally co-authored publications attain citation rates above the world’s average. This holds at country and institutional sector levels, although not all institutional sectors obtain the same benefit from collaboration. Multilateral collaboration with high-level R&D countries yields the highest values of research impact, although the impact of collaboration with low-level R&D countries has been optimised over the years. Although scientific collaboration is frequently based on individual initiative, policy actions are required to promote the more heterogeneous types of collaboration.

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Notes

  1. A preliminary version of this paper has been presented to the Science and Technology Indicators Conference, Montreal, Canada, September 5–8, 2012 (Bordons et al. 2012a).

  2. Although the CSIC belongs to the sector of public research centres, it has been considered separately under the assumption that collaboration between different CSIC centres involves less diversity than that between CSIC’s and other public research centres.

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  3. Special mention should be made of the rise in the share of co-authored papers between university and hospitals, which increases from 13 to 23 % of university papers over time.

  4. Average research level: 2.74 for multilateral versus 2.95 for bilateral collaboration in the first period; 2.57 for multilateral versus 2.82 for bilateral collaboration in the second period.

  5. “Centros de investigación biomédica en red” (CIBER), created by the Spanish government to achieve a critical mass of researchers by fields and beyond institutional boundaries to succeed in obtaining excellence in research.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by research grant CSO2008-06310 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Special thanks to Isabel Gómez for her comments on a previous draft of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Estudios Documentales en Ciencia y Tecnología (IEDCYT), Center for Human and Social Sciences (CCHS), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Albasanz 26-28, 28037, Madrid, Spain

    María Bordons & Javier Aparicio

  2. Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, Wassenaarseweg 62a, Leiden, 2300 AX, The Netherlands

    Rodrigo Costas

Authors
  1. María Bordons
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  2. Javier Aparicio
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  3. Rodrigo Costas
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to María Bordons.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 9.

Table 9 Descriptive statistics for MNJS and MNCS by collaborative type, number of authors, number of institutions and period
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Bordons, M., Aparicio, J. & Costas, R. Heterogeneity of collaboration and its relationship with research impact in a biomedical field. Scientometrics 96, 443–466 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0890-7

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