**1.1. What is scientific collaboration?**

Scientific work is no longer an individual task having researchers work in isolation but a collaborative endeavour, instead. In this manner, collaboration is present in all the fields of knowledge and takes a wide range of forms. Scientific co-authorship is thought of as a reaction to the process of professionalisation of research, in terms of publication [11]. Katz and Martin [12] state that it can happen between individuals, groups, departments, institutions, sectors, regions or countries.

Many are the reasons that lead researchers to collaborate, from which the following stand:


**9.** To increase the scientific productivity of either research groups or their members.

evaluation systems in almost every country. The situation represents a crucial shift in the nature of the behaviour of institutions and organisations that develop research programmes

Van Raan [6] includes, as one of the objectives of bibliometric analysis, the ability to establish a set of standardised indicators that facilitate the evaluation of scientific production. The characteristics and indicators that are obtained from bibliometric studies are useful for planning, developing and organising the resources and services of the institutions in charge of the admin-

Bibliometric studies are enormously relevant to the identification and characterisation of the scientific profile of countries, institutions for research and scientific fields themselves [9]. This statement is based on how they facilitate, among other things, the detection of research patterns or research strengths for each of the agents participating in the scientific process. Furthermore, evaluations with a basis on bibliometric indicators for citation have become commonplace in national processes for the evaluation of research at a university, faculty and

Scientific work is no longer an individual task having researchers work in isolation but a collaborative endeavour, instead. In this manner, collaboration is present in all the fields of knowledge and takes a wide range of forms. Scientific co-authorship is thought of as a reaction to the process of professionalisation of research, in terms of publication [11]. Katz and Martin [12] state that it can happen between individuals, groups, departments, institutions,

Many are the reasons that lead researchers to collaborate, from which the following stand:

**1.** Professionals seek opportunities to collaborate in order to increase their visibility within their field; it can be assumed that it applies to all fields of knowledge, since sciences gener-

**2.** To gain access to equipment, resources or materials that may facilitate or improve re-

**3.** To improve the composition of research groups with a view to increase the chances of

**7.** The chances of researching about interdisciplinary matters that touch on different areas of

**8.** To interact with institutions of equal or higher prestige or to support the development of

and projects [4, 5].

66 Scientometrics

istration [7, 8].

even departmental levels [10].

sectors, regions or countries.

search [12].

**1.1. What is scientific collaboration?**

ally share a common reward structure [13].

gaining financial support in open calls.

**4.** To know and share new methodological techniques.

others of a less established research tradition.

**5.** To increase efficacy and efficiency, as well as quality of research [14].

knowledge, due to which experts from each of them are necessary.

**6.** To establish research networks with a greater social and scientific salience.


Occasionally, professionals who seek to add something new to their field may find that the reward is greater in doing so through the search of diverse ideas and remote collaborators than in collaborating with others from their own laboratory [16]. The increase in international collaboration in research may be regarded as a consequence of the mentioned rationales for establishing new links within science.

When remote collaborators have different points of view and experiences, they can be more easily prone to questioning—or perhaps complementing—the perspectives and capacities of the other participants [16]. For this reason, it is likely that these collaborations result in research studies of a more innovative kind and promote progress within the field of research itself. Nonetheless, collaboration between over-specialised scientists is in some cases necessary to tackle certain problems that are highly specific within a particular field of knowledge [17].

Glänzel [18] points out that the relation between collaboration and scientific productivity is a very important aspect of research. This has led to bibliometric analysis becoming highly recursive in the literature on informational sciences or social studies about science. There have been attempts to find collaboration patterns in countries or regions for a specific scientific field; for instance, clinical medicine in Taiwan [19] and epidemiology in Bulgaria [20]. Similarly, collaboration patterns at the global level of sciences have been studied in Eastern Europe [21, 22] and, in Spain, the production in Science Citation Index (SCI), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts & Humanities [23, 24]. The field of Library Information Science itself (LIS) has been subject to various collaboration analyses [25–30].

Many of the studies reveal that collaboration raises not only participants' productivity but also the impact of their research [15]. However, Katz and Hicks [31] assert that the impact of an article in terms of citation is partially related with the number of participant authors, institutions and countries. In a study carried out by Narin and Whitlow [32] for the European Union, it was found that articles in which several institutions participated were more cited than those in which only one does. Likewise, articles are more cited when collaborators are foreign as compared with those that are signed by local or national collaborators.

Another aspect that attracts the attention of research on collaboration is the types of collaboration in terms of regions, determining if it is local, national or international [25, 33].

To measure collaboration, various indicators have been established, among which we highlight the following:

∑*<sup>j</sup>*=1 *A*

*j f j*


$$\text{(c)}\quad \text{Collaborative Coefficient (CC) [36]:}\\CC = \text{l} - \frac{\sum\_{j=1}^{4} \left(\frac{1}{j}\right) f\_j}{N}$$

*fj* = number of documents with j authors in collection *K*.

*N* = total number of documents in *K*.

*A* = total number of authors in collection *K*.

Collaborative research studies generally focus on a particular field in relation with itself or to a country or region. When studies in Social Sciences seek to compare collaboration indicators, it is usually done among subdisciplines within the same scientific field.

considering them equally. The same procedure was applied in the case of countries. The documents were grouped according to collaboration by country, as has been done in other similar studies [39]. Given that documents can be signed by authors from different countries, the sum

Collaboration and Citation Analysis Within Social Sciences: A Comparative Analysis…

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.76732

69

To analyse, treat and visualise collaborative networks, we have used the Pajek software [40].

The category *Urban Studies* presents 28 indexed journals in the 2016 JCR [37], 12 more than *Demography*; this is 31.57% more. In the period between 2000 and 2016, the documents indexed within the category *Demography* mounted to less than half of those in *Urban Studies*, more precisely, only 47.36%. During those years, a total of 35,359 documents were indexed, consider-

Concurrently with the increase of the production of documents along the period between 2000 and 2016, there was also an increase in the number of authors per article and, with it, collaboration in the category *Demography* (**Figure 1**). There is a correlation of 0.992 with a significance of 0.01, between the number of published documents and the number of documents with multiple authorships. Early in the set period of time, the difference between single and multiple authorship documents was of only 8.8%. Despite continuous ups and downs, such difference increased slowly by up to 20% in 2009. In 2010, the difference increased to 42% and remained ever since within an interval of a minimum of 30.3% to a

All this multiple authorship has an impact on collaboration indexes. In this line, the DC increased gradually from 0.52 in year 2000 to a top 0.67 in 2014 and 2015. Likewise, the CI ranges between an initial 1.87 and a maximum of 2.34 in 2014 (**Table 1**). The overall values for

**Figure 2** shows that the 70.4% of the documents from the *Demography* category are signed by one or two authors. A total of 39.5% of the papers have only one author, while articles with

The production of documents within the category *Demography* between 2000 and 2016 received a total of 147,024 citations. The average citation is of 12.9 cites per document (*SD* = 32.54), notwithstanding that 1840 received no citation at all, which represents 16.25 of total production. Analysing citation in relation with author collaboration, it can be seen that multi-author documents receive 63.98% of the total citations while single-author documents receive 36.02%. In differentiating documents according to the number of authors, the highest citation is received by the documents signed by a single author, followed by those signed by two and three

the time interval between years 2000 and 2016 are DC = 0.605 and CI = 2.14.

of the percentages is greater than 100%.

**3. Results and discussion**

ing both categories, in the SSCI.

maximum of 51.7%.

**3.1. Collaboration in the category demography**

four or less authors only represented 13.07%.

In this study, we aim to compare the collaboration between two different scientific fields of the Journal Citation Report (JCR), Social Sciences edition [37] with differences in the volume of scientific production indexed in the Web of Science (WOS) in the period 2000–2016.
