Does the author’s collaboration mode lead to papers’ different citation impacts? An empirical analysis based on propensity score matching

Abstract

• This study explores the impact of different collaboration modes on the cited frequency of publications. • Compared with the existing works, our PSM-based method is more innovative since we investigate the impact of author’s collaboration mode from a casual view. • Our method reduces the selection bias of samples and makes the variables more balanced. • Research collaboration, especially international collaboration, plays a significant role in promoting the impact of research results in three subfields of computer science. This study explores the impact of different collaboration modes on the cited frequency of publications. Though several studies have obtained some research results, most of them exploit association or regression-based methods, which may not lead to causal conclusions. To overcome the above challenges, we use the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method to analyze and compare the citation frequencies resulting from four groups of collaboration models: international versus domestic, international multilateral versus international bilateral, domestic inter-organizational versus domestic intra-organizational, and domestic multi-author versus domestic single-author. More specifically, we conduct this analysis by exploring the publications with three computer science subfields from the Web of Science (WoS) database. The experimental results show that international collaboration, especially international multilateral collaboration, has a significant role in increasing the frequency of citations to scientific publications, showing that internationalization and collaboration are critical factors in the growth of the impact of the papers. Among national co-publications, collaborative publications within national organizations receive a higher citation impact. Multi-author collaborations significantly increase citation frequency compared to single-author publications. Our heterogeneity analysis across the different subfields of the computer science domain finds that the treatment effects for the three subfields differ modestly and mostly significant from the whole sample. Moreover, besides the implications for developing research policy and scientist collaboration, our study can capture the causal effect between author collaboration patterns and citation frequency to reveal their causal effects.