Team size matters: Collaboration and scientific impact since 1900
Team size matters: Collaboration and scientific impact since 1900 is a research paper published in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (2014). On theSindex it has a DataRank of 0.918. It has been cited 455 times.
Abstract
This article provides the first historical analysis of the relationship between collaboration and scientific impact using three indicators of collaboration (number of authors, number of addresses, and number of countries) derived from articles published between 1900 and 2011. The results demonstrate that an increase in the number of authors leads to an increase in impact, from the beginning of the last century onward, and that this is not due simply to self‐citations. A similar trend is also observed for the number of addresses and number of countries represented in the byline of an article. However, the constant inflation of collaboration since 1900 has resulted in diminishing citation returns: Larger and more diverse (in terms of institutional and country affiliation) teams are necessary to realize higher impact. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential causes of the impact gain in citations of collaborative papers.
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FAIR Checklist
Context only (not used in score)- Has DOI
FAIR checklist signals are shown for context only and do not affect DataRank scoring.
DataRank Breakdown
Base Score Contribution
0.918
From this paper's citation signal
Citation Network Contribution
0
Citation network not refreshed for this result
This paper's DataRank is currently driven only by its base citation score. Citation network data was not refreshed for this result.
Learn more about DataRank methodology →Why this DataRank?
DataRank blends this paper's own citation count with the influence of the papers that cite it. Here, roughly 100% comes from its base citations and 0% from the citation network.
- Base score B(p)
- log1p(citation_count) — grows sub-linearly, so a paper with 1,000 citations is not 10× a paper with 100.
- Network N(p)
- Σ over citers of log1p(Cq) ÷ max(outdegreeq, 1). Being cited by a highly-cited paper with few references counts most.
- Damping factor d = 0.85
- DataRank = (1−d)·B(p) + d·N(p) — the two cards above are each already multiplied by their share.
- Self-citations excluded
- Citers sharing any OpenAlex author ID with this paper are filtered out before the network sum.
Citers are pulled from OpenAlex sorted by cited_by_count:descand capped per paper, so when the cap binds we keep the highest-signal references and the score is reproducible across reruns.