Investigating scientific collaboration through the sequence of authors in the publication bylines and the diversity of collaborators

Abstract

© 2019 17th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics, ISSI 2019 - Proceedings. All rights reserved. In scientometrics, it is critical to investigate the patterns of scientific collaboration and how these patterns result in different impacts. In this research, we investigate the relationship between the sequence of authors in the publication bylines and the diversity of their collaborators. The diversity of collaborators is quantified with two dimensions, namely topic and impact diversities. Using the ArnetMiner dataset containing ACM-indexed publications in computer science, we find that the following two patterns tend to lead higher-impact scientific publications: (1) greater topic diversity of collaborators plus more tendency to work as leading authors (including first and/or corresponding authors); and (2) less topic diversity of collaborators plus less tendency to work as leading authors. Meanwhile, from the perspective of impact diversity, the results of our empirical study show that authors who work as more leading authors and collaborate with less impact diversity researchers have tendencies to receive more citations than those with collaborators with greater impact diversity. We also detect different patterns of authors’ sequence and diversity of their collaborators before and after their Ph.D. graduation.