ISTOCK, LUCATOClose collaborations between pairs of researchers—spanning many years and jointly authored papers—can boost the number of citations each coauthored paper receives by 17 percent compared to publications resulting from shorter-term, less productive collaborations, according to an analysis published today (August 10) in PNAS. The findings lend support for institutional policies that support teamwork, said cardiologist and researcher Joseph Loscalzo of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who was not involved with the research.
“[The study] supports what people have suspected for a long time, but never been able to demonstrate well, quantitatively or semi-quantitatively,” Loscalzo added.
Alexander Petersen of Italy’s IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca analyzed publications authored by 473 biologists and physicists throughout their careers, comprising 166,000 collaborators and 94,000 papers. He found that 60 percent to 80 percent of the collaborations of a given scientist analyzed lasted one year or less (according to the amount of time between a first and last joint publication). A small number of collaborations—around 1 percent—spanned roughly two decades or more. Petersen said that these “super-ties,” akin to life partners in research, tended to publish more than 50 percent of their papers together. He even found examples of “twins”—two scientists ...
