Title
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, 18,500 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 cardinality of the author set of a paper and citation count as well as peer quality of the contribution. The correlation is stronger when the affiliations of authors are heterogeneous. There exist, however, notable and interesting counter-examples.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1016/j.joi.2010.06.003
Journal of Informetrics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Scholar collaboration,Bibliometrics,Peer review
Data mining,World Wide Web,Computer science,Citation,Cardinality,Discipline,Research Assessment Exercise,Bibliometrics,The arts,Library science
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
4
4
1751-1577
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
49
1.75
13
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Massimo Franceschet165839.91
Antonio Costantini2863.43