The effect of national and international multiple affiliations on citation impact

TL;DR

This study examines how researchers with multiple institutional affiliations, both national and international, influence citation impact across disciplines and countries, revealing distinct patterns and effects in research collaboration.

Contribution

It systematically analyzes the impact of multi-affiliated authorship on citations, differentiating national and international affiliations and their varying effects across countries and disciplines.

Findings

45.6% of publications involve multi-affiliated authorship.

National multi-affiliations are more common in medicine and biology.

International multi-affiliations are prevalent in Space Science, Physics, and Geosciences.

Abstract

Researchers affiliated with multiple institutions are increasingly seen in current scientific environment. In this paper we systematically analyze the multi-affiliated authorship and its effect on citation impact, with focus on the scientific output of research collaboration. By considering the nationality of each institutions, we further differentiate the national multi-affiliated authorship and international multi-affiliated authorship and reveal their different patterns across disciplines and countries. We observe a large share of publications with multi-affiliated authorship (45.6%) in research collaboration, with a larger share of publications containing national multi-affiliated authorship in medicine related and biology related disciplines, and a larger share of publications containing international type in Space Science, Physics and Geosciences. To a country-based view, we distinguish between domestic and foreign multi-affiliated authorship to a specific country. Taking G7 and BRICS countries as samples from different S&T level, we find that the domestic national multi-affiliated authorship relate to more on citation impact for most disciplines of G7 countries, while domestic international multi-affiliated authorships are more positively influential for most BRICS countries.