Large publishing consortia produce higher citation impact research but coauthor contributions are hard to evaluate

Mike Thelwall

doi:10.1162/qss_a_00003

Abstract

This paper introduces a simple agglomerative clustering method to identify large publishing consortia with at least 20 authors and 80% shared authorship between articles. Based on Scopus journal articles from 1996–2018, under these criteria, nearly all (88%) of the large consortia published research with citation impact above the world average, with the exceptions being mainly the newer consortia, for which average citation counts are unreliable. On average, consortium research had almost double (1.95) the world average citation impact on the log scale used (Mean Normalised Log Citation Score). At least partial alphabetical author ordering was the norm in most consortia. The 250 largest consortia were for nuclear physics and astronomy, involving expensive equipment, and for predominantly health-related issues in genomics, medicine, public health, microbiology and neuropsychology. For the health-related issues, except for the first and last few authors, authorship seem to primarily indicate contributions to the shared project infrastructure necessary to gather the raw data. It is impossible for research evaluators to identify the contributions of individual authors in the huge alphabetical consortia of physics and astronomy and problematic for the middle and end authors of health-related consortia. For small-scale evaluations, authorship contribution statements could be used when available.

Highlights

The frequency and scale of academic research collaboration varies within and between fields but has grown steadily over time (Fortunato et al, 2018)
Large publishing consortia are numerically common in academia but are very rare overall, at least as defined by the heuristic used here
This paper introduces a new method to identify large publishing consortia as well as evidence of their research impact, use of alphabetical ordering, and broad types

Summary

Introduction

The frequency and scale of academic research collaboration varies within and between fields but has grown steadily over time (Fortunato et al, 2018). Whilst arts and humanities scholars often work alone (Larivière et al, 2006; Wuchty et al, 2007), some types of experimental and applied research require large teams (de Solla Price, 1986). Interdisciplinary collaboration may be needed to solve complex real-world problems (e.g., Moore et al, 2017; Olds, 2016), in a process that has been called mode 2 science (Gibbons et al, 1994). Big teams may be needed to operate large-scale equipment, such as the Large Hadron Collider, and collaboration may sometimes be more efficient by combining expertise. Research consortia may be formed through policy decisions or in response to research funding requirements, which may be less successful (Defazio et al, 2009) or primarily benefit less successful partners (Hoekman et al, 2013)

Methods

Results

Conclusion