Abstract
Against a background of substantial growth in publication output in health sciences at the University of Cape Town (UCT) over the past two decades, we examined the relationship between collaboration with domestic and foreign institutions and resulting citations of co-published work. We report on trends in authorship and citation impact for health sciences research at UCT across three 3-year periods: 1999–2001, 2006–2008 and 2013–2015. We examined numbers of collaborative publications with domestic and foreign co-authors; the status of collaboration with other African countries; the location of the ‘drivers’ of the research (with ‘drivers’ indicated by first or last authorship); and expected and observed citation counts – used as an indicator of impact – over time. We found that the relative citation rate of the set of UCT health sciences publications has increased; the set of 1999–2001 publications was less frequently cited than expected for the journals in which the publications appear, while the 2006–2008 and 2013–2015 sets were cited more frequently than expected. Relative citation rates were greater for papers for which UCT shared international co-authorship than for papers with UCT-only or domestic co-authorship. Our findings confirm reports in the literature of higher citation of internationally co-authored publications. We additionally found that the publications with the highest relative citation rates were driven by authors from foreign institutions.
 Significance:
 
 Methods are presented for extracting, measuring, analysing and representing the citation impact of collaborative research.
 The relative citation rate of health sciences publications produced by UCT has increased and copublication with international authors has increased.
 The findings confirm reports in the literature of higher citation of publications co-authored with international collaborators.
 An apparent influence of foreign drivers on citation impact, holds risk for South African science.
Highlights
International collaboration for health-related research is encouraged by governments, funding agencies and university executives, and is sought by researchers
Against a background of substantial growth in publication output in health sciences at the University of Cape Town (UCT) over the past two decades, we examined the relationship between collaboration with domestic and foreign institutions and resulting citations of co-published work
We report on trends in authorship and citation impact for health sciences research at UCT across three 3-year periods: 1999–2001, 2006–2008 and 2013–2015
Summary
International collaboration for health-related research is encouraged by governments, funding agencies and university executives, and is sought by researchers. The South African Medical Research Council, the National Research Foundation, and the Department of Science and Technology, in their recent strategic plans, encourage collaboration and international partnership.[4,5,6] These agencies co-fund international research partnerships with foreign agencies such as the US National Institutes of Health and the UK Medical Research Council. Mouton et al.[7] report that South Africa’s publication output since 2000 has shown an average growth rate of 2.9% annually, with the country’s contribution to global research output increasing from 0.4% in 2000 to 0.91% in 2016. The Mouton et al.[7] report further shows that the citation impact of South African publications has increased over the period covered by their analysis. Citations are a measure of the acknowledgement by researchers of the work published by their peers
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