Abstract
Most research evaluations in the past adopted simple counting method to calculate the number of collaborative countries within a paper, however, the information related to the author is either neglected or excluded. Therefore, this study takes the “author” as the unit of analysis to conduct a country-level research evaluation, which mainly focus on the global publishing trend of multinational authorship papers, and their research contribution patterns that derived from the transformation of author roles. It also compares the citation impact of the four contribution patterns between China and the United States. The findings revealed that multinational authorship has become a growing trend, and China had the highest number of multinational authorship papers among all the studied nations. As for the research contribution patterns, the numbers of the dominant and the supervisory pattern papers continue to increase, while the primary and the contributory pattern papers are gradually decreasing. However, China is different from other countries. China has a high proportion of dominant, supervisory and primary pattern papers, which suggests that China gradually plays a critical role in international scientific collaboration. Nonetheless, a high degree of dominance or leadership in scientific collaboration activities does not translate into high citation impacts. It is only until 2016 that the citation impact of China’s supervisory papers exceeded the United States, as well as the dominant and primary papers in 2018. As for the contributory papers, the performance of the United States was far ahead for the past decade.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ahmed, S., Maurana, C., Engle, J., Uddin, D., & Glaus, K. (1997). A method for assigning authorship in multiauthored publications. Family Medicine, 29, 42–44.
Bachelet, V. C., Uribe, F. A., Díaz, R. A., Vergara, A. F., Bravo-Córdova, F., Carrasco, V. A., Lizana, F. J., Meza-Ducaud, N., & Navarrete, M. S. (2019). Author misrepresentation of institutional affiliations: Protocol for an exploratory case study. British Medical Journal Open, 9(2), e023983. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-023983
Baerlocher, M. O., Newton, M., Gautam, T., Tomlinson, G., & Detsky, A. S. (2007). The meaning of author order in medical research. Journal of Investigative Medicine, 55(4), 174–180. https://doi.org/10.2310/6650.2007.06044
Bennett, L. M., & Gadlin, H. (2012). Collaboration and team science: From theory to practice. Journal of Investigative Medicine., 60(5), 768–775. https://doi.org/10.2310/JIM.0b013e318250871d
Bhandari, M., Guyatt, G. H., Kulkarni, A. V., Devereaux, P. J., Leece, P., Bajammal, S., Heels-Ansdell, D., & Busse, J. W. (2014). Perceptions of authors’ contributions are influenced by both byline order and designation of corresponding author. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 67(9), 1049–1054. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2014.04.006
Bhattacharya, S. (2010). Authorship issue explained. Indian Journal of Plastic Surgery : Official Publication of the Association of Plastic Surgeons of India, 43, 233–234. https://doi.org/10.4103/0970-0358.73482
Committee on Publication Ethics. (2019). COPE Discussion Document: Authorship. https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.3.3
Council of Science Editors. (2018). CSE’s White Paper on Promoting Integrity in Scientific Journal Publications. http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/wp-content/uploads/entire_whitepaper.pdf
Cronin, B. (2001). Hyperauthorship: A postmodern perversion or evidence of a structural shift in scholarly communication practices? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52(7), 558–569. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.1097
Duffy, M. A. (2017). Last and corresponding authorship practices in ecology. Ecology and Evolution, 7(21), 8876–8887. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.3435
European Science Foundation. (2013). New concepts of researcher mobility—a comprehensive approach including combined/part-time positions. Science policy briefing 49, Strasbourg: European Science Foundation.
Gauffriau, M., Larsen, P. O., Maye, I., Roulin-Perriard, A., & Von Ins, M. (2008). Comparisons of results of publication counting using different methods. Scientometrics, 77(1), 147–176. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1934-2
González-Alcaide, G., Park, J., Huamaní, C., & Ramos, J. M. (2017). Dominance and leadership in research activities: Collaboration between countries of differing human development is reflected through authorship order and designation as corresponding authors in scientific publications. PLoS ONE, 12(8), e0182513. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0182513
Hottenrott, H., Rose, M., & Lawson, C. (2019). The rise of multiple institutional affiliations. ArXiv, 1912.05576. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.05576)
Hottenrott, H., & Lawson, C. (2017). A first look at multiple institutional affiliations: A study of authors in Germany. Japan and the UK. Scientometrics, 111(1), 285–295. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2257-6
Huang, M. H., & Chang, Y. W. (2018). Multi-institutional authorship in genetics and high-energy physics. Physica A Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications, 505, 549–558. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2018.03.091
Huang, M. H., Lin, C. S., & Chen, D. Z. (2011). Counting methods, country rank changes, and counting inflation in the assessment of national research productivity and impact. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(12), 2427–2436. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21625
International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. (2019). Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals. http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf.
Iribarren-Maestro, I., Lascurain-Sánchez, M. L., & Sanz-Casado, E. (2009). Are multi-authorship and visibility related? Study of ten research areas at Carlos III University of Madrid. Scientometrics, 79(1), 191–200. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0412-4
Katz, J. S., & Martin, B. R. (1997). What is research collaboration? Research Policy, 26(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0048-7333(96)00917-1
Kempers, R. D. (2002). Ethical issues in biomedical publications. Fertility and Sterility, 77(5), 883–888. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0015-0282(02)03076-5
Kumar, S. (2018). Ethical concerns in the rise of co-authorship and its role as a proxy of research collaborations. Publications, 6(3), 37. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications6030037
Marcus, E. (2016). What does it mean to be the corresponding author? http://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-be-the-corresponding-author
Peidu, C. (2019). Can authors’ position in the ascription be a measure of dominance? Scientometrics, 121(3), 1527–1547. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03254-1
Rennie, D., Yank, V., & Emanuel, L. (1997). When authorship fails. A proposal to make contributors accountable. JAMA, 278(7), 579–585. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1997.03550070071041
Riesenberg, D., & Lundberg, G. D. (1990). The order of authorship: who’s on first? The Journal of the American Medical Association, 264(14), 1857–1857. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1990.03450140079039
Sanfilippo, P., Hewitt, A. W., & Mackey, D. A. (2018). Plurality in multi-disciplinary research: Multiple institutional affiliations are associated with increased citations. PeerJ, 6, e5664–e5664. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.5664
Smith, E., & Master, Z. (2017). Best practice to order authors in multi/interdisciplinary health sciences research publications. Accountability in Research, 24(4), 243–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2017.1287567
Tarkang, E. E., Kweku, M., & Zotor, F. B. (2017). Publication practices and responsible authorship: A review article. Journal of Public Health in Africa, 8(1), 723. https://doi.org/10.4081/jphia.2017.723
Tong, S., Yue, T., Shen, Z., & Yang, L. (2020). The effect of national and international multiple affiliations on citation impact. https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.06803.
Tscharntke, T., Hochberg, M. E., Rand, T. A., Resh, V. H., & Krauss, J. (2007). Author sequence and credit for contributions in multiauthored publications. PLOS Biology, 5(1), e18. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0050018
Waltman, L. (2012). An empirical analysis of the use of alphabetical authorship in scientific publishing. Journal of Informetrics, 6(4), 700–711. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2012.07.008
Wren, J. D., Kozak, K. Z., Johnson, K. R., Deakyne, S. J., Schilling, L. M., & Dellavalle, R. P. (2007). The write position. A survey of perceived contributions to papers based on byline position and number of authors. EMBO Reports, 8(11), 988–991. https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.embor.7401095
Wuchty, S., Jones, B. F., & Uzzi, B. (2007). The increasing dominance of teams in production of knowledge. Science, 316(5827), 1036–1039. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1136099
Yang, S., Wolfram, D., & Wang, F. (2017). The relationship between the author byline and contribution lists: A comparison of three general medical journals [journal article]. Scientometrics, 110(3), 1273–1296. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2239-0
Yank, V., & Rennie, D. (1999). Disclosure of researcher contributions: A study of original research articles in the lancet. Annals of Internal Medicine, 130(8), 661–670. https://doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-130-8-199904200-00013
Zauner, H., Nogoy, N. A., Edmunds, S. C., Zhou, H., & Goodman, L. (2018). Editorial: We need to talk about authorship. GigaScience. https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giy122
Acknowledgements
This work was financially supported by the Center for Research in Econometric Theory and Applications (Grant no. 109L900204) from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan, and by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Taiwan, under Grant No. 109-2634-F-002-045.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Appendix 1
Appendix 1
See Table 4.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Liu, HI., Huang, MH. Research contribution pattern analysis of multinational authorship papers. Scientometrics 127, 1783–1800 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04277-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04277-x