Understanding institutional collaboration networks: effects of collaboration on research impact and productivity

Abstract

There is substantial competition among academic institutions. They compete for students, researchers, reputation, and funding. For success, they need not only to excel in teaching, but also their research profile is considered an important factor. Institutions accordingly take actions to improve their research profiles. They encourage researchers to publish frequently and regularly (publish or perish) on the assumption that this generates both more and better research. Collaboration has also been encouraged by institutions and even required by some funding calls.

This thesis examines the empirical evidence on the interrelations among institutional research productivity, impact and collaborativity. It studies article publication data across ACM and Web of Science covering five disciplines { Computer Science, Pharmacology, Materials Science, Psychology and Law. Institutions that publish less seek to publish collaboratively with other institutions. Collaboration boosts productivity for all the disciplines investigated excepted Law; however, the amount of productivity increase resulting from the institutions' attempt to collaborate more is small. The world's most productive institutions publish at least 50% of their papers on their own. Institutions doing more collaborative work are not found to correlate strongly with their impact either. The correlation between collaborativity and individual paper impact or institutional impact is small once productivity has been partialled out. In Computer Science, Pharmacology and Materials Science, no correlation is found. The decisive factor appears to be productivity. Partialling out productivity results in the largest reductions in the remaining correlations. It may be that only better equipped and well-funded institutions can publish without having to rely on external collaborators. These institutions have been publishing most of their output non-collaboratively, and are also of high quality and highly reputable, which may have equipped and funded them in the first place
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ORCID for Les Carr: orcid.org/0000-0002-2113-9680

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