Citation Impact of Collaboration from Intra- and Inter-disciplinary Perspectives: A Case Study of Korea

Abstract

Purpose - This research aims to examine collaboration from a disciplinary perspective in Korea. There are needs to explore to what extent researchers collaborate by discipline and across discipline along with the impact of collaboration. Design/methodology/approach - In order to investigate collaboration with respect to entire discipline areas and author-declared discipline information we analyzed a national researcher information database (Korean Researcher Information) with a citation index database (Korean Citation Index) covering the entire range of discipline. This study analyzed the data sets for 10 years (2004-2013) including a total of 8 categories and 119 sub-categories of disciplines, 109,551 researchers, 650,263 articles, and 1,170,039 citations in Korea. Findings - The results demonstrate that there are different intensities of collaboration from heavy to minimal across disciplines. In examining collaboration in terms of author and discipline levels, the results show that collaboration in author level rises, then inter-disciplinary collaboration increases accordingly, in most of the 119 discipline sub-categories. A number of disciplines, however, tended to collaborate more intensely within their own rather than with other disciplines. Moreover, the impact of collaboration tended to change over time depending on the types of collaboration. Specifically, inter-disciplinary collaboration was likely to have more immediate impact as pioneer research, especially among more than three disciplines, whereas the impact of intra-disciplinary collaboration is higher as time passes. Originality/value - In this research, a disciplinary investigation on collaboration is conducted for the entire range of disciplines in Korea. Through analyzing distinctive author-declared discipline information from the KRI, this research examines the intensities of collaboration across disciplines, collaboration in author level, and the impact of collaboration.