**1. Introduction**

Enquiries about science point to the existence of valid indicators to measure the level of scientific activity and scientific accomplishments from various perspectives: scientific fields, authors, institutions, faculties, departments, research groups and countries [1, 2]. The results of such studies are complemented with another set of indicators and are used at different governmental and organisational levels in, among other things, allocating economic and human resources [3]. It is increasingly evident given the development and consolidation of research

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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 and projects [4, 5].

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

**11.** To increase citation and, hence, the impact and visibility of scientific production [15].

problems.

of knowledge [17].

light the following:

establishing new links within science.

**10.** To work with colleagues who share the same interests, ideas, theoretical frameworks or

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

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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

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

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

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

Another aspect that attracts the attention of research on collaboration is the types of collabora-

To measure collaboration, various indicators have been established, among which we high-

∑*<sup>j</sup>*=1 *A j f j* \_\_\_\_ *N*

foreign as compared with those that are signed by local or national collaborators.

tion in terms of regions, determining if it is local, national or international [25, 33].

itself (LIS) has been subject to various collaboration analyses [25–30].

a) Collaboration Index (CI) defined by Lawani [34]: *IC* =

b) Degree of Collaboration (DC) [35]:

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 administration [7, 8].

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 even departmental levels [10].
