Collaboration Effect by Co-Authorship on Academic Citation and Social Attention of Research

TL;DR

This study analyzes how co-authorship influences academic citations and social attention across different fields, finding that more co-authors generally increase impact, but with diminishing returns as the number grows.

Contribution

It quantifies the impact of co-authorship on citations and social attention across fields, considering access type and revealing diminishing returns with more co-authors.

Findings

More co-authors lead to higher citations and social attention.

Impact benefits of collaboration are consistent across access types.

Diminishing returns observed as the number of co-authors increases.

Abstract

Academic citation and social attention measure different dimensions of the impact of research results. Both measures do not correlate with each other, and they are influenced by many factors. Among these factors are the field of research, the type of access, and co-authorship. In this study, the increase in the impact due to co-authorship in scientific articles disaggregated by field of research and access type, was quantified. For this, the citations and social attention accumulated until the year 2021 by a total of 244,880 research articles published in the year 2018, were analyzed. The data source was Dimensions.ai, and the units of study were research articles in Economics, History and Archaeology, and Mathematics. As the main results, a small proportion of the articles received a large part of the citations and most of the social attention. Both citations and social attention in-creased, in general, with the number of co-authors. Thus, the greater the number of co-authors, the greater the probability of being cited in academic articles and mentioned on social media. The advantage in citation and social attention due to collaboration is independent of the access type for the publication. Furthermore, although collaboration with an additional co-author is in general positive in terms of citation and social attention, these positive effects reduce as the number of co-authors increases.