The Scaling Relationship between Citation-Based Performance and Scientific Collaboration in Natural Sciences

TL;DR

This study reveals a power-law relationship between citation performance and collaboration in natural sciences, showing stronger effects for collaborative papers and quantifying how citations scale with collaboration levels.

Contribution

It extends understanding of the power-law relationship between citation performance and collaboration, highlighting differences between collaborative and single-authored papers in natural sciences.

Findings

Power-law correlation with exponent 1.20 between citations and collaboration.

Collaborated papers exhibit a stronger Matthew effect than single-authored papers.

Citations increase 2.30 times with each doubling of collaborative papers.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to extend our knowledge about the power-law relationship between citation-based performance and collaboration patterns for papers of the Natural Sciences domain. We analyzed 829,924 articles that received 16,490,346 citations. The number of articles published through collaboration account for 89%. The citation-based performance and collaboration patterns exhibit a power-law correlation with a scaling exponent of 1.20, SD=0.07. We found that the Matthew effect is stronger for collaborated papers than for single-authored. This means that the citations to a field research areas articles increase 2.30 times each time it doubles the number of collaborative papers. The scaling exponent for the power-law relationship for single-authored papers was 0.85, SD=0.11. The citations to a field research area single-authored articles increase 1.89 times each time the research area doubles the number of non-collaborative papers.