Analyzing the influence of prolific collaborations on authors productivity and visibility

Abstract

Science has become more collaborative over the past years, as evidenced by the growing number of authors per publication and the emergence of interdisciplinary research endeavors involving specialists from different fields. In this context, it is not trivial to quantify the individual impact of researchers. To address this issue, we evaluate the effect of the most productive collaboration tie (as measured by the number of co-authored papers) on the productivity and visibility metrics of established researchers. We analyzed the impact on the researcher’s metrics, such as the number of publications, citations, and h-index, when their co-authored works with their most productive collaborator were excluded from the analysis. A comprehensive analysis conducted utilizing over 243 million papers revealed different patterns of prolific collaborator influence across the major fields of knowledge. In formal and applied sciences, the impact of prolific collaborators on the visibility metrics of authors is substantial, even among those who are highly cited. These results have significant implications for stakeholders who are seeking to understand collaboration patterns and to develop measures of success that consider collaboration ties.