Does scientific collaboration pay off? A novel bibliometrics study of the impact of international collaboration on scientific publications over time

Abstract

This research investigates recent trends and developments in the scope and impact of international collaboration in research publications. A number of prior studies in the field of Research & Development (R&D) have outlined the factors influencing an increasing internationalization in R&D. We transfer these findings in a complete sample of publication data from the years 2008–2015 in order to find out and describe how researchers in the two academic fields Health Care/Clinical Medicine and Business & Economics collaborate with foreign-based colleagues. We analyze how this research by international teams performs in terms of received citations, compared to their national counterparts. We find that international teams generally receive more citations than national ones. Furthermore, we outline how the number of countries with relevant publication numbers has grown and diversified over the last years, and author teams generally became larger and more international. In a last step, we show how emerging countries built up competence and knowledge over time, as an increase in received publication citations follows at a delayed pace to an increase in publication numbers. While there are some differences between the two academic fields Health Care/Clinical Medicine and Economics & Business, with, for example the former having approximately around ten times more publications per year, than the latter, the major structural trends and developments are similar in both fields, outlining the robustness of our analysis.