Ming-Yueh Tsay*
Professor
E-mail: mytsay@nccu.edu.tw Cheng-Yuan Kuo
Graduate Student
Graduate Institute of Library, Information & Archival Studies National Chengchi University
Taipei, Taiwan
E-mail: 94155010@nccu.edu.tw Abstract
The purpose of this research is to investigate the author productivity and de-gree of collaboration in the literature of engineering for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China from 1989 to 2008. The data were collected from the SCIE database for 14 engineering disciplines. The average authors per ar-ticle, the researcher with whom the authors collaborate, the highly productive institutions, the correlation between the number of authors and the frequency of being cited are explored. The results of the study reveal that 1. Biomedical engineering and environmental engineering have the highest average number of author collaborations in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland China; 2. The percentage of multi-author literature is approximately 90% in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland China; 3. There are only a few single-author papers; 4.
For highly productive organizations, the majority of author collaborations have a higher concentration in National Taiwan University, National Cheng Kung University, National Tsing Hua University, and National Chaio Tung University in Taiwan; 5. The researchers from National Taiwan University collaborate mostly with the researchers from the same university; 6. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland China have the most international collaboration with the United States of America; 7. The single-author paper in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland China has a lower frequency of being cited in general; 8.
There is no correlation between the number of authors and the frequency of be-ing cited.
Keywords: Bibliometrics; Collaboration research; Author productivity; Cita-tion analysis; Engineering
SUMMARY
The purpose of this research is to investigate the degree of collaboration of engineering-related literature for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland China from 1989 to 2008. Based on the database of Science Citation Index Expand
* Principal author for all correspondence.
(SCIE), 14 engineering disciplines were studied and the average number of authors per article, the researcher with whom the authors collaborate, highly productive academic institutions, the researcher with whom the institutions collaborate, the correlation between the number of authors and the frequency of being cited are explored.
The results of the study reveal the followings: For the 14 engineering-related disciplines investigated, the Immune Bio-Medical Engineering and Environmental Engineering are the areas that have more researchers, coming from the main-land China, conducting collaborative research. The percentage of multi-author literature is higher than 90% in both above mentioned disciplines. As to the highly productive institutions in Taiwan, National Taiwan University, National Cheng Kung University, National Tsing Hua University, and National Chao Tong University are the top four institutions on the list. The researchers in National Taiwan University collaborate mostly with their fellow colleagues. The City University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Polytechnic University are the most productive institutions in Hong Kong. Moreover, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University has the highest figures in terms of the “collaboration with fellows in same university”. The top most productive institutions in China are Tsinghua University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Zhejiang University. In addition, it is found that the researchers in the three areas under study collaborate most with researchers in the United States of America. The citation figures for single-author articles are generally low in any site of the three areas under study. It is also re-vealed that there is no significant correlation between the number of authors and the frequency of being cited.
With regards of collaboration among the researchers in the three areas, the study reveals that the percentage of collaborative research in the mainland China is, in general, low. The figures of Taiwan-Hong Kong collaborations are around 3% to 5%. The numbers for China-Taiwan and China-Hong Kong are all below 4%. Since the researchers in the three areas under study share close terra and language, the collaboration barriers should be lower and there is great room for the collaboration among the researchers in the three areas. On the other hand, the percentage of collaboration between Taiwan and foreign institution is 12.74%, which is much lower than that of Hong Kong-foreign institution (34.13%) and China-foreign institution (27.73%). Among the Taiwan-foreign country collabo-ration, the ratio of Taiwan-USA collaborative articles is 40%. It is evident that the literature produced in Taiwan mostly come from single institutions or collaborate with local institutions. It is recommended that research organizations in Taiwan may develop more cross-country collaborative projects so that the quality of re-search may be further enhanced.
In addition, in Taiwan, among all the 12 research articles authored by over 30 persons, only one lists the author who works at the Academia Sinica as the corresponding author. The corresponding authors of the rest of the 12 articles are all affiliated with a foreign institution. This reflects that even though research-ers in Taiwan do participate in cross-country collaboration projects, most of the researchers are not the leading investigators.
The academic productivity is generally evaluated by giving every co-author a full credit or giving the averaged credit to each individual. However, nowadays it is very common, especially in the discipline of natural science, that many authors, possibly over one hundred, are teamed up for one research article, making the above mentioned methods for academic productivity calculation unfair. It is suggested considering making correspondence authors to have the major credit.
This method sees the corresponding author and his/her affiliation as the principle contributors for the research article, thus giving him/her a higher weighting factor, so that the evaluation for academic productivity would be more reasonable and objective.
The academic productivity evaluation system in Taiwan overly emphasizes the number of publications included in the citation index databases. Treating this number as the main evaluation index for academic productivity would possibly increase the number of research, but it would also jeopardize the quality of the research being conducted. Therefore, it is suggested making the frequency of citations as part of the evaluations, in addition to the aforementioned numbers, which would increase not only the volume of research but also the quality of the research. However, self-citations need to be watched out with this evaluation approach as they could increase the frequency of citations, thus cause potential statistical bias.
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