The Effect of the Internet on Co-authorship Among Researchers and on the Impact of Publications
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Wu, Yi-Chen
Abstract
This study used secondary data analysis to observe co-authorship and the impact of publications in 48 information systems journals published in two periods of 1981-1985 and 2006-2010. We wanted to examine the effect of the Internet on co-authorship and the effect of co-authorship on the impact of publications. We hypothesized that the advent of the Internet increased co-authorship among scholars because the Internet decreased communication cost among scholars. The Internet helped to loosen the constraints of time and space. Scholars could use multimedia to exchange data and information. Besides, scholars could communicate with many scholars at the same time. We also hypothesized that co-authorship increased the impact of publicatios because scholars could have more research resources through collaborations. Scholars could exchange ideas and share the burdens in researches.
To examine the hypotheses, we first collected 48 information systems journals articles published in 1981-1985 and 2006-2010. Next, we indentified the first authors and the reprint authors of these articles, and sampled the authors. Last, we collected the publications of these sampled authors. The articles were confined to 48 information systems journals and were published in 1981-1985 and 2006-2010. We observed the 4,130 articles in this study.
We defined 1981-1985 as pre-web and 2006-2010 as post-web. Number of authors, number of fields, and number of countries of articles were used to observe co-authorship. Citations received by articles were used to measure the impact of publications.
We found that after the advent of the Internet, multiple-authors articles increased 41.6%, multiple-fields articles increased 18.92%, and multiple-countries articles increased 16.23%. Co-authorship significantly increased. We used t test to examine the effect of the Internet on co-authorship and found the average number of authors significantly increased from 1.64 to 2.76, the average number of fields significantly increased from 1.14 to 1.36, and the average number of countries significantly increased from 1.07 to 1.27. The result supported our hypothesis that the Internet affected co-authorship such that co-authorship increased in post-web that in pre-web.
We also used t test to examine the effect of co-authorship on the impact of publications. We found multiple-authors and multiple-countries articles had larger citations received than single-author and single-country articles, while multiple-fields articles and single-field articles had no significant differences for citations received. This result partially supported the hypothesis that co-authorship had positive effect on the impact of publications. The reason why multiple-fields articles had no larger citations received may be the factor that colaborated authors in different fields easily produced new research topics. New research topics required time to attract attentions and thus the impact of publications did not significantly increased. Last, we used regression method to examine the mediation effect of co-authorship. We found co-authorship partially mediated the effect of the Internet on the citations received, such that citations received were significantly larger in post-web than in pre-web.
In this study, we found that scholars could use the Internet to increase the interactions with others and thus increase the co-authorship among scholars. We also found that scholars could increase the impact of publications through collaborating with many scholars and many scholars affiliated in different countries.
Subjects
Internet
Collaborations
Co-authorship
Information Systems Research
Impact of Publications
Type
thesis
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