Not all international collaboration is beneficial: The Mendeley readership and citation impact of biochemical research collaboration

摘要

Biochemistry is a highly funded research area that is typified by large research teams andudis important for many areas of the life sciences. This article investigates the citationudimpact and Mendeley readership impact of biochemistry research from 2011 in the Webudof Science according to the type of collaboration involved. Negative binomial regressionudmodels are used that incorporate, for the first time, the inclusion of specific countriesudwithin a team. The results show that, holding other factors constant, larger teams robustlyudassociate with higher impact research, but including additional departments has no effectudand adding extra institutions tends to reduce the impact of research. Althoughudinternational collaboration is apparently not advantageous in general, collaboration withudthe USA, and perhaps also with some other countries, seems to increase impact. Inudcontrast, collaborations with some other nations associate with lower impact, althoughudboth findings could be due to factors such as differing national proportions of excellentudresearchers. As a methodological implication, simpler statistical models would have foundudinternational collaboration to be generally beneficial and so it is important to take intoudaccount specific countries when examining collaboration.