Do scholars' collaborative tendencies impact the quality of their publications? A generalized propensity score matching analysis

Qiuling Liu, Lei Guo, Yiping Sun, Linlin Ren, Xinhua Wang and Xiaohui Han

Journal of Informetrics, 2024, vol. 18, issue 1

Abstract: Recently, the research on the cooperation relationship between authors has received widespread attention. However, existing studies still have the following limitations: 1) They mainly study the impact of author collaboration patterns by correlation analysis without considering the existence of confounding factors. 2) Methods based on causal analysis primarily focus on exploring the impact of different cooperation models, while less considering the author's tendency to participate. 3) Previous studies fail to incorporate the structural attributes of the authors' cooperation network into covariates, which may lead to confounding bias. To overcome the above limitations, we further explore the causal effect of authors' participation levels on the quality of their publications by leveraging the Generalized Propensity Score Matching (GPSM) method. Moreover, to alleviate the influence of the structural features in the authors' cooperation network, we then take the typical structural features as covariates, preventing us from reaching incorrect conclusions caused by the variable bias. We conduct extensive experiments on a real-world dataset (collected from the Web of Science (WoS) core collection), and from the experimental results, we find that authors having different involvement tendencies usually have publications with different qualities. Specifically, we observe an “inverted U-shaped” curve on authors' participation tendencies. That is, the quality of papers first rises and then decreases with the increase of authors' participation tendencies, which means that researchers who excessively collaborate with others actually experience a decrease in average paper quality.

Keywords: Cooperation mode; Generalized propensity score matching; Casual relationship; Optimal participation tendencies; Collaborative tendencies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157723001128
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:infome:v:18:y:2024:i:1:s1751157723001128

DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2023.101487

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Informetrics is currently edited by Leo Egghe

More articles in Journal of Informetrics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().