Title: Is together better? Examining scientific collaborations across multiple authors, institutions, and departments,
Abstract: Collaborations are an integral part of scientific research and publishing. In
the past, access to large-scale corpora has limited the ways in which questions
about collaborations could be investigated. However, with improvements in
data/metadata quality and access, it is possible to explore the idea of
research collaboration in ways beyond the traditional definition of multiple
authorship. In this paper, we examine scientific works through three different
lenses of collaboration: across multiple authors, multiple institutions, and
multiple departments. We believe this to be a first look at multiple
departmental collaborations as we employ extensive data curation to
disambiguate authors' departmental affiliations for nearly 70,000 scientific
papers. We then compare citation metrics across the different definitions of
collaboration and find that papers defined as being collaborative were more
frequently cited than their non-collaborative counterparts, regardless of the
definition of collaboration used. We also share preliminary results from
examining the relationship between co-citation and co-authorship by analyzing
the extent to which similar fields (as determined by co-citation) are
collaborating on works (as determined by co-authorship). These preliminary
results reveal trends of compartmentalization with respect to
intra-institutional collaboration and show promise in being expanded.