What is research collaboration

There is abundant evidence that research collaboration has become the norm in every field of scientific and technical research. We provide a critical overview of the literature on research collaboration, focusing particularly on individual-level collaborations among university researchers, but we also give attention to university researchers’ collaborations with researchers in other sectors, including industry. We consider collaborations aimed chiefly at expanding the base of knowledge (knowledge-focused collaborations) as well as ones focused on production of economic value and wealth (property-focused collaborations), the latter including most academic entrepreneurship research collaborations. To help organize our review we develop a framework for analysis, one that considers attributes of collaborators, collaborative process and organization characteristics as the affect collaboration choices and outcomes. In addition, we develop and use a “Propositional Table for Research Collaboration Literature,” presented as an “Appendix” to this study. We conclude with some suggestions for possible improvement in research on collaboration including: (1) more attention to multiple levels of analysis and the interactions among them; (2) more careful measurement of impacts as opposed to outputs; (3) more studies on ‘malpractice’ in collaboration, including exploitation; (4) increased attention to collaborators’ motives and the social psychology of collaborative teams.

Research collaboration in universities and academic entrepreneurship: the-state-of-the-art

Interviews with scientists about the content and reward of collaborations, and classification of contributions of co-authors and scientists cited in acknowledgements, identified six types of research collaborations with distinct patterns of rewards; showed that about half of the collaborations are invisible in formal communication channels because they are not rewarded; and showed that about one third of the collaborations are rewarded only by acknowledgements Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing

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What do we measure by co-authorships?

It is shown that the mean number of authors per paper or the proportion of the multiple-authored papers is inadequate as a measure of the degree of collaboration in a discipline. A measure which combines some of the merits of both measures is suggested and derived. This measure, called the Collaborative Coefficient, is derived for four commonly used probability distributions.

Collaborative coefficient: A single measure of the degree of collaboration in research

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

Scientific research is becoming an increasingly collaborative endeavour. The nature and magnitude of collaboration vary from one discipline to another, and depend upon such factors as the nature of...

K. Subramanyam

Papers

Bibliometric studies of research collaboration: A review: