Large publishing consortia produce higher citation impact research but co-author contributions are hard to evaluate
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Authors
Thelwall, MichaelIssue Date
2020-02-20
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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 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 around 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 primary 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.Citation
Thelwall, M. (2020) Large publishing consortia produce higher citation impact research but co-author contributions are hard to evaluate, Quantitative Science Studies, 1(1), pp. 290-302. DOI: 10.1162/qss_a_00003Publisher
MIT PressJournal
Quantitative Science StudiesAdditional Links
https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/qssType
Journal articleLanguage
enISSN
2641-3337ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1162/qss_a_00003
Scopus Count
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/