Does scientific collaboration variety influence the impact of articles?

Abstract

This study attempts to investigate the relationship between scientific collaboration variety and scientific output in a specific field. The indicators were set from co-author variety (co-author’s academic background variety and co-author’s network structure variety as independent variables) and article impact (academic impact and social impact as dependent variables). Considering other factors affecting the research results, we also set up control variables (the number of co-authors, proportion of high-level authors and ratio of highly productive authors). We used the Scopus database as the data source and collected all articles published in the dental field in 2018 as data. We used multiple linear regression analyses to examine the impact of co-authors’ variety on the article impact. The results demonstrate that the relationship between scientific collaboration variety and article impact is complicated, which depends on the type of variety of the cooperative scientist. Conversely, the same variety indicator presents the same results as the correlation analysis of academic and social impact articles. The findings indicate that authors can improve their scientific output by collaborating with similar authors of academic backgrounds or stable groups of authors, which provides guidance for scientific cooperation.