The power law relationship between citation impact and multi-authorship patterns in articles in Information Science & Library Science journals

The aim of this paper is to extend the conversation about the correlation between collaboration and citation impact in articles in Information Science & Library Science journals by analyzing this correlation’s behavior using a power scaling law approach. 28,131 articles that received 215,693 citations were analyzed. The number of these articles that were published through collaboration accounts for 69%. In general, the scaling exponent of multi-authored articles, both international and domestic, increases over time while the exponent of single-authored papers decreases. The citation impact and collaboration patterns exhibit a power law correlation with a scaling exponent of 1.34 ± 0.02. Citations to multi-authored articles increased \(2^{1.34}\) or 2.53 times each time the number of multi-authored papers doubled. The Matthew Effect is stronger for multi-authored papers than for single-authored. The scaling exponent for the power law relationship of domestic multi-authored papers was 1.35 ± 0.02. The citations to domestic multi-authored articles increased \(2^{1.35}\) or 2.55 times each time the number of domestic multi-authored articles doubled. Contrary to previous studies we found that the Matthew Effect is stronger for domestic multi-authored papers than for international multi-authored ones.