Webology, Volume 6, Number 1, March, 2009 |
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Dear Dr. Noruzi
The conclusions you reached in your editorial (Noruzi, 2008) that ‘a published paper resulting from collaborative research has a higher chance of attracting more citations’ might well be right, but not from the data that you presented. In your study you counted the number of co-authored and the number of single-authored papers published from prestigious universities, and the numbers of citations that they received. But it is not correct to conclude from this procedure that co-authoring leads to higher citation rates because, in your study, there were many more co-authored papers. Technically, to test your hypothesis properly, you would need to compare the citation rates of an equal number of co-authored and single-authored papers to arrive at a fair conclusion.
It may well be true that co-authoring has many advantages - including higher citation rates - and this conclusion has been reported by others in addition to the authors that you cite (e.g., see Bahr & Zemon, 2000; Lee & Bozerman, 2005). And, in this connection, it is of interest to observe that in my summary of the publication rates of 11 Nobel prizewinners, I reported that all of them collaborated with others on occasion. However, it is also of interest that four of them published more single-authored papers than joint-authored ones, and that seven of them did the reverse (Hartley, 2008).