Analyzing the influence of prolific collaborations on authors productivity and visibility

TL;DR

This paper investigates how prolific collaboration ties affect individual researchers' productivity and visibility, revealing field-dependent patterns and emphasizing the importance of collaboration in scientific impact.

Contribution

It provides a novel analysis of the influence of top collaboration ties on researchers' metrics across different scientific fields.

Findings

Prolific collaborators significantly impact visibility metrics in formal and applied sciences.

Excluding prolific collaborators reduces researchers' citation and h-index scores.

Patterns of collaboration influence vary across scientific disciplines.

Abstract

Science has become more collaborative over the past years, a phenomenon that is related to the increase in the number of authors per paper and the emergence of interdisciplinary works featuring specialists of different fields. In such a environment, it is not trivial to quantify the individual impact of researchers. Here we analyze how the most prolific collaboration tie (in terms of co-produced works) of an established researcher influences their productivity and visibility metrics. In particular, we check how the number of produced works, citations and h-index rank of an researcher changes when their works also coauthored by their prolific collaborators are not considered. We observed different patterns of prolific collaborator influence across the major fields of knowledge. More specifically, in formal and applied sciences, the prolific collaborators seem to play an important role to the visibility metrics of authors even when they are among the highly cited. Such a results can help stakeholders to better understand the collaboration patterns and draw measures of success that also consider collaboration ties.