Collaboration and cross-disciplinarity in autoimmune diseases

Collaboration and cross-disciplinarity are important features in autoimmune disease research. Taking co-authorship as an indicator for research collaboration, for selected European countries it was found that 91% to 99% of all publications are based on collaboration. International collaboration affects about 27% of all publications. Small countries like Sweden and Finland pursue international collaboration more intensively than larger countries like Germany or the UK. Different collaboration strategies were found for nationally co-authored papers, for instance, Germany seems to focus more on intra-departmental collaboration, while France and Italy have stronger inter-institutional links. About 54% of all publications are based on cross-disciplinary The term ‘cross-disciplinarity’ is used to highlight the fact that contributions from more than one discipline are made and required. This more general term is used—rather than the term ‘interdisciplinarity’—because it collaboration, which was found to be even more important in international collaboration. is hard or even impossible to distinguish interdisciplinary from multi-disciplinary work based on the data used. For a more detailed discussion of the terminology see e.g. Refs 1–5.