Team size matters: Collaboration and scientific impact since 1900

By Vincent Larivière, Yves Gingras, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Andrew Tsou. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol., 2014

475 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article provides the first historical analysis of the relationship between collaboration and scientific impact using three indicators of collaboration (number of authors, number of addresses, and number of countries) derived from articles published between 1900 and 2011. The results demonstrate that an increase in the number of authors leads to an increase in impact, from the beginning of the last century onward, and that this is not due simply to self‐citations. A similar trend is also observed for the number of addresses and number of countries represented in the byline of an article. However, the constant inflation of collaboration since 1900 has resulted in diminishing citation returns: Larger and more diverse (in terms of institutional and country affiliation) teams are necessary to realize higher impact. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential causes of the impact gain in citations of collaborative papers.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/24e4cea18872d05beb7b1d114f2df0416ec5c209

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Information Systems and Management

1. Ludo Waltman
2. Rodrigo Costas
3. Vincent Larivière
4. S. Haustein
5. Cassidy R. Sugimoto

In Statistics and Probability

1. Ludo Waltman
2. Rodrigo Costas
3. S. Haustein
4. Vincent Larivière
5. Cassidy R. Sugimoto
6. Raminta Pranckute

Citations in the corpus

• Gender and international diversity improves equity in peer review (2018, background): “Given that science has grown increasingly collaborative and 488 that average authorship per paper has expanded [102,103], future studies of disparities 489 would benefit from explicitly accounting for multiple authorship roles and signaling 490 among various leadership positions on the byline [65,10”
• A review of the literature on citation impact indicators (2015, background): “Such studies are reported by Larivière and Macaluso (2011) for the province of Québec in Canada, by Engels et al.”
• Characterizing Social Media Metrics of Scholarly Papers: The Effect of Document Properties and Collaboration Patterns (2015, result): “Ci-tations show a positive correlation with the number of references (0.416), the collaboration indicators (particularly the number of authors: 0.281), and paper length (0.194); these findings have been documented in many other bibliometric studies (e.g., [41 – 47]).”