Global and local collaborators: A study of scientific collaboration

doi:10.1016/0306-4573(92)90096-I

Information Processing & Management

Volume 28, Issue 1, 1992, Pages 99-109

https://doi.org/10.1016/0306-4573(92)90096-I Get rights and content

Abstract

Increased co-authorship in schistosomiasis has been shown to be associated with research funding. The small core of grantees is highly prolific. Furthermore, strong evidence points to the existence of two types of co-authors, namely, the globals who appear to co-author with individuals outside their own group, and the locals who are limited in their formal collaboration. The globals constitute a small group of highly productive scientists, whereas there is a large pool of lower-rank locals. The data supports the theory that scientific collaboration serves as a means to advance research, as well as a mechanism to increase the visibility and authorship of the highly productive.

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In the production of novel research, the role of subauthors is often essential; subauthors are those people whose help is acknowledged by the authors. Subauthorship is the means that indirectly facilitates the diffusion of scientific thought (Glänzel & Schubert, 2004; Lee-Pao, 1992; Heffner, 1981). Subauthors in finance often come from both the academic community and the market.
Acknowledgments are a special kind of intellectual partnership. Acknowledged scientists in published papers are called subauthors. We examine collaboration patterns between authors and subauthors in four finance journals from 1994 to 2013: the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. We employ social network analysis and discover that the majority of subauthors form a compact giant component with small average distances between the nodes. Moreover, the subauthorship network in finance has a non-overlapping structure, exhibiting low clustering coefficients and a plethora of cohesive groups of nodes.
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Due to the necessity to keep pace with scientific progress not only at the micro level (e.g., level of individual researchers) but also at the macro level (i.e., nationally), most governments are interested in enhancing the level of international collaborations through appropriate policies (Katz & Martin, 1997; van Raan, 2004). Scientific collaboration in addition to advance research, facilitates increasing the visibility and authorship of the highly productive researchers (Pao, 1992). An important result of scientific collaborations is the creation of new scientific knowledge, including new research questions, new research proposals, new theories, and new publications (Stokols, Harvey, Gress, Fuqua, & Phillips, 2005).
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By examining the curriculum vitae of 443 academics and dividing the number of publication credits by the number of authors in each credit, the authors found little relationship. There has also been a positive correlation established between collaboration and funding allocation (Hart, Carstens, LaCroix, & May, 1990; Heffner, 1981; Pao, 1992; Price, 1981). And, as Bahr and Zemon (2000, p. 491) write, collaboration can be its own reward, a mechanism aimed at “alleviating the professional isolation” of many academics.
There has been a longstanding debate about the merits of collaborative research, with most studies focusing on the citation advantage of such research. However, citation studies provide only one lens on the issues. New methods of inquiry are necessary to incorporate other audiences of scholarly literature. Reader response surveys were used to evaluate the quality of collaborative versus single-authored research. Graduate students in three sections of the same library and information science course during the 2010 academic year used surveys to rate each week's assigned readings according to overall quality, usefulness for class discussion, and enjoyability. Students voted whether to keep each article in the reading list for the following semester. Data were analyzed to compare results for single-author versus multi-author works. Multi-author works were favored over single-author. These findings provide another layer of empirical support for the benefits of collaborative research and inform both scientometricians and educators.
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^☆: This publication is supported in part by a NIH grant R01-LM-04680 from the National Library of Medicine

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Global and local collaborators: A study of scientific collaboration☆

Abstract

Little Science, Big Science

Collaboration in an invisible college

American Psychologist

Studies in scientific collaboration: Part I. The professional origins of scientific co-authorship

Scientometrics

Studies in scientific collaboration: Part II. Scientific co-authorship, research productivity, and visibility in the French scientific elite, 1799–1830

Scientometrics

Studies in scientific collaboration: Part III. Professionalization and the natural history of modern scientific co-authorship

Scientometrics

Citation measures of hard science, soft science, technology and nonscience

Research support, multiple authorship, and publications in sociological journals, 1936–1964

Collaboration in the professional growth of American sociology

Social Science Information

Funded research, multiple authorship, and subauthorship collaboration in four disciplines

Scientometrics