Elsevier

Journal of Informetrics

Volume 7, Issue 4, October 2013, Pages 966-971
Journal of Informetrics

Do more distant collaborations have more citation impact?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2013.10.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We address question whether systematic differences exist between pairs of collaborating countries in terms of the citation impact of their joint output.

  • We find that citation impact increases with the geographical distance between the collaborating counties.

  • Country-specific effects on citation impact are also substantial.

  • We find no effect of language and interdisciplinarity on citation impact.

Abstract

Internationally co-authored papers are known to have more citation impact than nationally co-authored paper, on average. However, the question of whether there are systematic differences between pairs of collaborating countries in terms of the citation impact of their joint output, has remained unanswered. On the basis of all scientific papers published in 2000 and co-authored by two or more European countries, we show that citation impact increases with the geographical distance between the collaborating counties.

Introduction

International collaboration is a salient feature of present-day scientific research. Especially since the 1990s, a rapid rise occurred in internationally co-authored papers (Doré et al., 1996, Georghiou, 1998, Glänzel, 2001). The increase was dramatic: the share of internationally co-authored publications doubled between 1990 and 2000 (Wagner & Leydesdorff, 2005). The number of internationally co-authored articles grew at a rate faster than traditional nationally-co-authored articles (NSB, 2002). This trend continued after 2000 (Hoekman, Frenken, & Tijssen, 2010). While there are large differences among fields in the number of international co-authorships (Heimeriks, 2013, Hoekman et al., 2010), an increase can be seen across all fields of science at more or less the same rate (Hoekman et al., 2010, Wagner and Leydesdorff, 2005).

A striking feature of internationally co-authored papers is the tendency of their citation impact to be systematically higher than that of nationally co-authored papers (Frenken et al., 2009, Narin et al., 1991). This pattern suggests that, on average, scientists will have more impact by international partnering as opposed to national partnering. Though the citation premium for internationally co-authored papers is well known, it is unlikely that all pairs of countries equally gain from collaboration. Our question is: what explains the variation in the citations (if any) received by internationally co-authored papers? Using data for over 33,000 papers concerning all collaborations in Europe in 2000, our main result holds that citation impact increases with the geographical distance between the collaborating counties.

Section snippets

International co-authorship and its citation impact

Since the study by Narin et al. (1991) on international scientific collaboration, several studies have noted the citation premium enjoyed by internationally co-authored papers compared to nationally co-authored ones. They found that co-publications involving affiliations to several European countries were twice as heavily cited as papers reporting a single EC country affiliation. This finding has been confirmed by later studies such as the ones by Frenken, Hölzl, and De Vor (2005), Frenken,

Methodology

We used Elsevier's Scopus database and selected all publications from 2000 which report affiliation addresses from at least two different European countries. As we are interested in European collaborations only, we left out single authored papers as well as papers reporting any non-European addresses in addition to the European ones. This procedure resulted in a total of 33,524 papers.

The dependent variable is the total number of citations a paper received before the end of 2009. This number

Results

Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics, and Table 2 the correlation between independent variables. As it is clear, independent variables show low levels of correlation, except (not surprisingly) for the variables nr_authors and nr_countries. No problems of multi collinearity were encountered. As a robustness check, we performed also an un weighted regression analysis on the subset of papers which were co-authored by only two countries. The results of this additional analysis is reported as

Conclusion

Research collaboration through international co-authorship has been an increasingly important phenomenon in science. Growing international collaboration is not only the result of ‘big science’ but also part of the globalization process in scientific research (Glänzel and Schubert, 2005, Leydesdorff and Wagner, 2009, Waltman et al., 2011). Our results suggest that the recombination of dissemination opportunities, skills, and resources from research centers located farther away, increases a

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