Trend and impact of international collaboration in

Authors: Wah Yun Low Kwan Hoong Ng M A Kabir Ai Peng Koh Janaki Sinnasamy

Publish Date: 2013/09/17

Volume: 98, Issue: 2, Pages: 1521-1533

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Abstract

Research collaboration is the way forward in order to improve quality and impact of its research findings International research collaboration has resulted in international coauthorship in scientific communications and publications This study highlights the collaborating research and authorship trend in clinical medicine in Malaysia from 2001 to 2010 Malaysianbased author affiliation in the Web of Science Science Citation Index Expanded and clinical medicine journals n = 999 and articles n = 3951 as of 30th Oct 2011 were downloaded Types of document analyzed were articles and reviews and impact factors IF in the 2010 Journal Citation Report Science Edition were taken to access the quality of the articles The number of publications in clinical medicine increased from 45  n = 178 in 2001 to 239  n = 944 in 2010 The top three contributors in the subject categories are Pharmacology and Pharmacy 139  General and Internal Medicine 136  and Tropical Medicine 73  By journal tier system Tier 1 187  n = 738 Tier 2 225  n = 888 Tier 3 296  n = 1170 Tier 4 272  n = 1074 and journals without IF 21  n = 81 University of Malaya was the most productive Local collaborators accounted for 603  and international collaborations 397  Articles with international collaborations appeared in journals with higher journal IFs than those without international collaboration They were also cited more significantly than articles without international collaborations Citations impact factor and journal tiers were significantly associated with international collaboration in Malaysia’s clinical medicine publications Malaysia has achieved a significant number of ISI publications in clinical medicine participation in international collaborationIn last decade international collaboration has been intensified due to the effects of globalization and rapid development in scientific communication With international research collaboration there is an increased in international coauthorship in scientific communications and publications Internationally coauthored articles have doubled since 1990s and continued to increase until now and in all field of disciplines Prathap 2013 Wagner 2008 Wagner and Leydesdorff 2005 NSB 2002 Glanzel 2001 Georghious 1998 Dore et al 1996 It also improves research quality and high impact publications in high impact scientific journals International coauthored publications have shown to have greater number of citations than domestic or national coauthored publications Levitt and Thelwall 2009 Glanzel et al 1999 Katz and Martin 1997 Others have also shown that international collaboration enhances citation impact LanchoBarrantes et al 2013 MoyaAnegon et al 2008 ChinchillaRodriguez et al 2010 Hsu and Huang 2010 There are cited up to twice as frequently as singlecountry papers Narin and Whitlow 1990Research in international collaboration and publication is abounding in developed countries But such is not the case in Asia where our regional journals are faced with scarce resources like financial issues peer review system journal management and operation guidelines and these have to be addressed to compete with more established journal or articles from advanced countries Low and Ng 2011 One cannot doubt that international collaboration is the way forward to improve quality of the article its coverage and its impact Elsewhere in Asia numerous studies were undertaken highlighting the quality and quantity of scientific publications and international collaboration particular in China Wang et al 2013 He 2009 Taiwan Liu et al 2012 Chen et al 2007 and in India Basu and Kumar 2000 Kundra and Kretschmer 1999 However in Malaysia there is a dire need for international research collaboration and publication as studies in this area is indeed very scantyAdams 2013 stressed that we are entering the fourth age of research driven by international collaboration and institutions that do not form international collaborations risk progressive disenfranchisement and countries that do not nurture their talent will lose out entirely Thus to maintain intellectual strength and to inculcate a good research culture we need to further study the strengths and weaknesses of research collaboration and publications Studies such as these are negligible in a country like Malaysia where although there is a lot of emphasis on research collaboration and scholarly publication in achieving internationally recognized university ranking much has not been known of the output of such collaboration and research funding Thus such a study is indeed justifiable in determining the output of research funding and the direction of the country’s publicationBased on the Malaysian Science and Technology Indicator 2008 report Ministry of Science Technology and Innovation Malaysia 2008 the total number of Malaysianauthored Science and Technology ST publications as indexed in SCOPUS from Feb 2001 to Feb 2009 were 22276 The growth rate of publications was 5  for 2002 and 137  for 2008 Among the public institutes of higher learning University of Malaya UM produced the highest number of publications in ST followed by University Science Malaysia USM University Putra Malaysia UPM University Kebangsaan Malaysia UKM and University Technology Malaysia UTM from 2001 to 2008The total number of publications indexed in Thomson Reuters Web of Science WoS database 2001–2010 was 24377 The contributions according to different broad subject category were Science 54  Engineering 21  Medicine 175  Arts Humanities and Social Sciences 4  Computer Science 3  and Dentistry 05 However these dataset did not provide a detailed analysis for medicine Therefore this paper analyzes Malaysian research collaboration in the field of clinical medicine using some standard bibliometric indicators to examine the pattern and the impact of international collaboration on publication productivity Specifically this study aim to examine the trend of international collaboration in scholarly publication in the area of clinical medicine over the years from 2001 till 2010 and also to examine the patterns of such collaboration in terms of journal impact factor citations impact of both domestic and international articles collaboration countries and determining the factors influencing international collaboration in scholarly publicationsFrom ISI Web of Science® including Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index we downloaded the records belonging to Malaysian based on the addresses of the authors’ affiliations The time period of our analysis was limited to the publication years between 2001 and 2010 Because the year in the search fields referred to the year in which a paper was indexed we extended the searched timespans to 2000–2011 and extracted those eligible records We also downloaded a journal list that was compiled by the Thomson Reuters Corporation for the ISI Essential Science Indicators® Each of the journals status October 2011 in the list was categorized accordingly to the respective fields The field of clinical medicine of Malaysian based authors contained 990 journals these journals were used to identify bibliographic records belonging to clinical medicine and found 3941 articlesThe analysis was limited to the “articles” and “reviews” in the journal of clinical medicine covered in the ISI database Notes letters editorials news meeting abstracts were excluded from the analysis The impact factor IF in the 2010 Journal Citation Report JCR Science Edition were taken to access the quality of the articles We identified the authors’ affiliations and countries from the fields of affiliation and corresponding address International collaboration was deemed to exist in an article if any author’s affiliation was located outside Malaysia The names of affiliations were less well formatted than those of countries Besides an institution might change its name during the study period or have several affiliates This required the authors to process the affiliations manually

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