The effect of scholar collaboration on impact and quality of academic papers

We study how scholar collaboration varies across disciplines in science, social science, arts and humanities and the effects of author collaboration on impact and quality of co-authored papers. Impact is measured with the aid of citations collected by papers, while quality is determined by the judgements expressed by peer reviewers. To this end, we take advantage of the dataset provided by the first-ever national research assessment exercise of Italian universities, which involved 20 disciplinary areas, 102 research structures, 18500 research products, and 6661 peer reviewers. Collaboration intensity neatly varies across disciplines: it is inescapable is most sciences and negligible in most humanities. We measured a general positive association between the cardinality of the author set of a paper and the citational impact and peer quality of the contribution. The correlation is stronger when the affiliations of authors are heterogeneous. There exist, however, notable and interesting c...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: JOI
• Authors: Massimo Franceschet, Antonio Costantini
• Keywords: Collaboration, First-ever National Research, JOI 2010, Peer Reviewers