Is collaboration among scientists related to the citation impact of papers because their quality increases with collaboration? An analysis based on data from F1000Prime and normalized citation scores

摘要

In recent years, the relationship of collaboration among scientists and thecitation impact of papers have been frequently investigated. Most of thestudies show that the two variables are closely related: an increasingcollaboration activity (measured in terms of number of authors, number ofaffiliations, and number of countries) is associated with an increased citationimpact. However, it is not clear whether the increased citation impact is basedon the higher quality of papers which profit from more than one scientistgiving expert input or other (citation-specific) factors. Thus, the currentstudy addresses this question by using two comprehensive datasets withpublications (in the biomedical area) including quality assessments by experts(F1000Prime member scores) and citation data for the publications. The study isbased on nearly 10,000 papers. Robust regression models are used to investigatethe relationship between number of authors, number of affiliations, and numberof countries, respectively, and citation impact - controlling for the papers'quality (measured by F1000Prime expert ratings). The results point out that theeffect of collaboration activities on impact is largely independent of thepapers' quality. The citation advantage is apparently not quality-related;citation specific factors (e.g. self-citations) seem to be important here.