The Influence of International Collaboration on the Scientific Impact in V4 Countries

Abstract

Several strategies are used by researchers and research facilities to increase their scientificproduction and consequent research quality. Bibliometric records show that coauthorship and thenumber of participating organizations in research publications are steadily increasing , however, theeffect of collaboration varies across disciplines, and the corresponding author’s country appears toinfluence research impact. This finding inspired our research question for this study: How doesinternational cooperation affect scientific impact, and does the affiliation of corresponding authorsinfluence citation impact indicators at the level of individual publications? To this end, we provide acomparative evaluation of research articles published in Q1 journals among Visegrad Group countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) in Medical and Health sciences between 2017 and2021. The study investigates the relationship between collaboration type (national vs. international) and scientific impact (impact factor of the journal and category normalized citation impact or researchpapers), as well as the impact of the country of the corresponding author ’s affiliation on quantitativequality of individual papers. We show that Q1 research papers in international collaboration have ahigher scientific impact than papers published in national partnerships. Moreover, the correspondingauthors’ country of affiliation significantly affects scientific impact.