Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Analyzing the influence of prolific collaborations on authors productivity and visibility

  • Published:
Scientometrics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Science has become more collaborative over the past years, as evidenced by the growing number of authors per publication and the emergence of interdisciplinary research endeavors involving specialists from different fields. In this context, it is not trivial to quantify the individual impact of researchers. To address this issue, we evaluate the effect of the most productive collaboration tie (as measured by the number of co-authored papers) on the productivity and visibility metrics of established researchers. We analyzed the impact on the researcher’s metrics, such as the number of publications, citations, and h-index, when their co-authored works with their most productive collaborator were excluded from the analysis. A comprehensive analysis conducted utilizing over 243 million papers revealed different patterns of prolific collaborator influence across the major fields of knowledge. In formal and applied sciences, the impact of prolific collaborators on the visibility metrics of authors is substantial, even among those who are highly cited. These results have significant implications for stakeholders who are seeking to understand collaboration patterns and to develop measures of success that consider collaboration ties.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Abramo, G., & D’Angelo, C. A. (2014). How do you define and measure research productivity? Scientometrics, 101(2), 1129–1144.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Abramo, G., & Angelo, A. (2015). The relationship between the number of authors of a publication, its citations and the impact factor of the publishing journal: Evidence from Italy. Journal of Informetrics, 9(4), 746–761.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C. A., & Di Costa, F. (2009). Research collaboration and productivity: Is there correlation? Higher Education, 57(2), 155–171.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Abramo, G., Cicero, T., & D’Angelo, C. A. (2013). Individual research performance: A proposal for comparing apples to oranges. Journal of Informetrics, 7(2), 528–539.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ajiferuke, I., & Wolfram, D. (2010). Citer analysis as a measure of research impact: Library and information science as a case study. Scientometrics, 83(3), 623–638.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ajiferuke, I., Lu, K., & Wolfram, D. (2010). A comparison of citer and citation-based measure outcomes for multiple disciplines. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(10), 2086–2096.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Amancio, R., Oliveira, N., Jr., Costa, F., et al. (2012). On the use of topological features and hierarchical characterization for disambiguating names in collaborative networks. EPL, 99(4), 48002.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Amancio, D. R., Oliveira, O. N., Jr., & Costa, Ld. F. (2015). Topological-collaborative approach for disambiguating authors‘ names in collaborative networks. Scientometrics, 102(1), 465–485.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Batista, P. D., Campiteli, M. G., & Kinouchi, O. (2006). Is it possible to compare researchers with different scientific interests? Scientometrics, 68(1), 179–189.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Beaver, D. (2001). Reflections on scientific collaboration (and its study): Past, present, and future. Scientometrics, 52(3), 365–377.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brito, C., Silva, N., Amancio, R., et al. (2021). Associations between author-level metrics in subsequent time periods. Journal of Informetrics, 15(4), 101–218.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bukvova, H. (2010). Studying research collaboration: A literature review. All Sprouts Content, 10(3), 326.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chacon, X. S., Silva, T. C., & Amancio, D. R. (2020). Comparing the impact of subfields in scientific journals. Scientometrics, 125, 625–639.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Corrêa, E. A., Jr., Silva, F. N., Costa, Ld. F., & Amancio, D. R. (2017). Patterns of authors contribution in scientific manuscripts. Journal of Informetrics, 11(2), 498–510.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fenner, M. (2014). Altmetrics and other novel measures for scientific impact. Opening science (pp. 179–189). Springer.

  • Freeman, R. B., Ganguli, I., & Murciano-Goroff, R. (2015). Why and Wherefore of Increased Scientific Collaboration. University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • García-Pérez, M. A. (2012). An extension of the h index that covers the tail and the top of the citation curve and allows ranking researchers with similar h. Journal of Informetrics, 6(4), 689–699.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harzing, A. W. (2016). Microsoft academic (search): A phoenix arisen from the ashes? Scientometrics, 108(3), 1637–1647.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hug, S. E., & Brändle, M. P. (2017). The coverage of microsoft academic: Analyzing the publication output of a university. Scientometrics, 113, 1551–1571.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ioannidis, P., Klavans, R., Boyack, W., et al. (2016). Multiple citation indicators and their composite across scientific disciplines. PLoS Biology, 14(7), e1002501.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ioannidis, P., Boyack, W., Baas, J., et al. (2020). Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators. PLoS Biology, 18(10), e3000918.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Larivière, V., Gingras, Y., Sugimoto, C. R., & Tsou, A. (2015). Team size matters: Collaboration and scientific impact since 1900. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(7), 1323–1332.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Li, W., Aste, T., Caccioli, F., & Livan, G. (2019). Reciprocity and impact in academic careers. EPJ Data Science, 8(1), 20.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mabry, P. L., Yan, X., Pentchev, V., Van Rennes, R., McGavin, S. H., & Wittenberg, J. V. (2020). Cadre: A collaborative, cloud-based solution for big bibliographic data research in academic libraries. Frontiers in Big Data, 3, 42.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pelacho, M., Ruiz, G., Sanz, F., Tarancón, A., & Clemente-Gallardo, J. (2021). Analysis of the evolution and collaboration networks of citizen science scientific publications. Scientometrics, 126(1), 225–257.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Qin, J., Lancaster, F. W., & Allen, B. (1997). Types and levels of collaboration in interdisciplinary research in the sciences. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48(10), 893–916.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sabharwal, M. (2013). Comparing research productivity across disciplines and career stages. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, 15(2), 141–163.

    Google Scholar 

  • Silva, F. N., Amancio, D. R., Bardosova, M., Costa, Ld. F., & Oliveira, O. N., Jr. (2016). Using network science and text analytics to produce surveys in a scientific topic. Journal of Informetrics, 10(2), 487–502.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thelwall, M. (2017). Microsoft academic: A multidisciplinary comparison of citation counts with Scopus and Mendeley for 29 journals. Journal of Informetrics, 11(4), 1201–1212.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tohalino, J. A. V., & Amancio, D. R. (2018). Extractive multi-document summarization using multilayer networks. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 503, 526–539.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tohalino, V., Silva, C., Amancio, R., et al., (2023) Using citation networks to evaluate the impact of text length on the identification of relevant concepts. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.06168

  • Viana, M. P., Amancio, D. R., & Costa, Ld. F. (2013). On time-varying collaboration networks. Journal of Informetrics, 7(2), 371–378.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wang, K., Shen, Z., Huang, C., Wu, C. H., Eide, D., Dong, Y., Qian, J., Kanakia, A., Chen, A., & Rogahn, R. (2019). A review of microsoft academic services for science of science studies. Frontiers in Big Data, 2, 45.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wang, K., Shen, Z., Huang, C., Wu, C. H., Dong, Y., & Kanakia, A. (2020). Microsoft academic graph: When experts are not enough. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(1), 396–413.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

A preprint version of this manuscript is available at arXiv. A.C.M.B. acknowledges financial support from São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP Grant No. 2020/14817-2) and Capes-Brazil for sponsorship. D.R.A. acknowledges financial support from FAPESP (Grant No. 20/06271-0) and CNPq-Brazil (Grant Nos. 304026/2018-2 and 311074/2021-9). This material is partially supported by AFOSR #FA9550-19-1-0391.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science,Department of Computer Science, University of São Paulo, São Carlos, São Paulo, Brazil

    Ana C. M. Brito & Diego R. Amancio

  2. Indiana University Network Science Institute, 47408, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Filipi N. Silva

Authors
  1. Ana C. M. Brito
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Filipi N. Silva
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Diego R. Amancio
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Diego R. Amancio.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Electronic Supplementary Information

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Electronic Supplementary file1 (PDF 362 KB)

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Brito, A.C.M., Silva, F.N. & Amancio, D.R. Analyzing the influence of prolific collaborations on authors productivity and visibility. Scientometrics 128, 2471–2487 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04669-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04669-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation