Global Research Report Multi-Authorship and Research Analytics
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Global Research Report Multi-authorship and research analytics Jonathan Adams, David Pendlebury, Ross Potter and Martin Szomszor Author biographies Jonathan Adams is Director of the Martin Szomszor is Head of Research David Pendlebury is Head of Institute for Scientific Information, Analytics at the Institute for Scientific Research Analysis at the Institute at the Web of Science Group. Information. He joined from Digital for Scientific Information, at the He is also a Visiting Professor at King’s Science where, as Chief Data Scientist Web of Science Group. Since 1983 College London, Policy Institute, he applied his extensive knowledge he has used Web of Science data to and was awarded an Honorary of machine learning, data integration study the structure and dynamics of D.Sc. in 2017 by the University and visualization techniques to research. He worked for many years of Exeter, for his work in higher found the Global Research Identifier with ISI founder Eugene Garfield. education and research policy. Database. He was named a 2015 top- With Henry Small, David developed 50 UK Information Age data leader ISI’s Essential Science Indicators. Ross Potter is a Data Scientist at the for his work in creating the REF2014 Institute for Scientific Information. impact case studies database for He has extensive research experience the Higher Education Funding within academia, including NASA- Council for England (HEFCE). related postdoctoral positions at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston, Texas, and Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Foundational past, visionary future The Institute for Today, as the ‘university’ of the • Carries out research to sustain, Scientific Information Web of Science Group, ISI both: extend and improve the knowledge base and • Maintains the foundational disseminates that knowledge ISI builds on the work of Dr. Eugene knowledge and editorial rigor upon to our colleagues, partners and Garfield – the original founder and which the Web of Science index and all those who deal with research a pioneer of information science. its related products and services in academia, corporations, Named after the company he are built. Our robust evaluation and funders, publishers and founded – the forerunner of the curation have been informed by governments via our reports Web of Science Group – ISI was research use and objective analysis and publications and at re-established in 2018 and serves as a for almost half a century. Selective, events and conferences. home for analytic expertise, guided structured and complete data in by his legacy and adapted to respond the Web of Science provide rich to technological advancements. insights into the contribution and value of the world's most impactful Our global team of industry- scientific and research journals. recognized experts focus on the These expert insights enable development of existing and researchers, publishers, editors, new bibliometric and analytical librarians and funders to explore approaches, whilst fostering the key drivers of a journal's value collaborations with partners and for diverse audiences, making academic colleagues across the better use of the wide body of global research community. data and metrics available. ISBN 978-1-9160868-6-9 2 Executive summary The Web of Science has identified Complex authorship (many authors, The effect of multi and hyper- a growing number of research many countries) has continued to rise authorship can be observed at articles with 1,000 or more in the last five years. The largest country level. The effect depends unique authors across more relative increases are associated with on the size of a country’s domestic than 100 different countries. a marked rise in hyper-authorship. research base. For all countries, The combination of many authors/ (Figure 2) citation impact increases with rising many countries creates a complex authorship, but gains at higher authorship pattern that differs One additional country on an counts are more evident and variable from more typical academic papers article has a greater benefit than for smaller countries (Figure 8). and drives elevated citation rates. one additional author: complex authorship is correlated with Every country gains citation impact In this report we describe two indicators of research performance through its share of the 5% of global patterns linking complex authorship (Category Normalized Citation multi-author 10 or more) articles. with effects that increase citation Impact - CNCI, Figure 3); author count In small and growing research rates: a general increase associated is linked to a slight but continuous economies the average CNCI of with multi-authorship (more than impact rise (Figure 4); country count these articles is five or more times 10 authors and more than five is linked to a steeper and more higher than typical articles (Table 3). countries); and more perturbing erratic impact rise (Figure 5). outcomes of hyper-authorship (more than 100 authors spread Author and impact patterns vary across more than 30 countries). between disciplines. In Biology, rising author and country counts are Across the Web of Science, the most coherently linked to rising citation frequent number of authors on an impact, but in Clinical Medicine article is three and 95% of global the effect is more erratic for higher output has 10 or fewer authors counts with higher CNCI up to (Table 1). The most frequent number 100 times the world average. of countries on an article is one and In Chemistry there is no strong link 99% of global output has authors between author count and citations from five or fewer countries. (Figure 6); Particle Physics has (Figure 1, Table 2) erratically high impact values at high country counts (Figure 7). We recommend… That the presence, in any sample, of articles with more than 10 authors should be acknowledged and separately described because it will influence interpretation. Although multi-authorship leads to higher impact, this link is coherent, progressive and regular for most (but not all) discipline categories and for some fields there is little or no effect. No change needs to be made to data management or analytics in this regard. That articles with hyper-authorship, beyond 100 authors and/or 30 countries, be treated differently. These articles are, to put it simply, different: they have unpredictable, incoherent effects that can sometimes be very large. There is a strong argument for removing such data from all associated analyses at national as well as at institutional level. Hyper-authorship produces particularly different and erratic patterns across Clinical Medicine and Particle Physics. The effects do not fit into a broader pattern, are not repeated across all disciplines and are far from consistent. The presence of such articles may be significant, even distorting, at institutional level. 3 Introduction The Web of Science Group has long monitored the growth of author and address counts on research publications. In 2012, writing in ISI’s Science It pointed to ‘guest authorship’ Cronin (2001) concluded that Watch, Chris King noted that the and reciprocal offers of free author hyper-authorship signifies a change numbers of publications indexed on tickets to colleagues as drivers that in research nature. The major Web of Science that had more than have led to an actual drop in global challenges of research – population 50 authors rose from around 400 to productivity of articles per author. studies, epidemiology, climate more than 1,000 between 1998 and change, particle and space sciences – 2011, while the number with more Rising author counts were noted require investment in equipment, than 100 authors doubled to 600 long ago by Derek De Solla Price data collection, longitudinal over the same period (King, 2012). (Price, 1963). Some may be driven studies and analytical processing by a cultural habit of adding senior associated with large teams. Prior to 2000, the maximum number members to research group outputs The lone researcher is now a less of authors on a single article rarely (Croll, 1984) which is said to be more viable model for major innovations. exceeded 500. In 2004 the 1,000 cap common in some countries with was broken with a paper of 2,500 relatively hierarchical structures. authors. The abundance of such The increase in the number of articles continues to increase and the biomedical papers that include a record is now held by a 2015 article by departmental chair as co-author has Is a paper with the ATLAS team on the Higgs Boson, been noted (Drenth, 1998); however, with 5,153 authors at more than 500 the increase in multi-authorship is too 100 authors the institutional addresses (Aad et al., widespread a phenomenon for this 2015; Mallapaty, 2018). to be a general explanation. There same kind of are discipline analyses of authorship The count of countries listed among cultures and patterns in specific areas, communication author affiliations has similarly including social sciences (Endersby, increased. International collaboration 1996), economics (Hudson, 1996) as a paper with was relatively scarce in the 1980s but and medically related research has grown rapidly: more than half of where single authorship in the New one or a few the articles attributable to any one England Journal of Medicine fell authors? country now have a co-author from from 98% to 5% during the 20th another (Adams, 2013). The incentives century (Constantian, 1999). for such collaboration are diverse; data, however, can be a key driver This rise in authorship