International collaboration is being heralded as the hallmark of contemporary scientific production. Yet little quantitative evidence has portrayed the landscape and trends of such collaboration. To this end, 14,000,000 documents indexed in Thomson Reuters's Web of Science (WoS) were studied to provide a state-of-the-art description of scientific collaborations across the world. The results indicate that the number of authors in the largest research teams have not significantly grown during the past decade; however, the number of smaller research teams has seen significant increases in growth. In terms of composition, the largest teams have become more diverse than the latter teams and tend more toward interinstitutional and international collaboration. Investigating the size of teams showed large variation between fields. Mapping scientific cooperation at the country level reveals that Western countries situated at the core of the map are extensively cooperating with each other. High-impact institutions are significantly more collaborative than others. This work should inform policy makers, administrators, and those interested in the progression of scientific collaboration.

This study assesses whether eleven factors associate with higher impact research: individual, institutional and international collaboration; journal and reference impacts; abstract readability; reference and keyword totals; paper, abstract and title lengths. Authors may have some control over these factors and hence this information may help them to conduct and publish higher impact research. These factors have been previously researched but with partially conflicting findings. A simultaneous assessment of these eleven factors for Biology & Biochemistry, Chemistry and Social Sciences used a single negative binomial-logit hurdle model estimating the percentage change in the mean citation counts per unit of increase or decrease in the predictor variables. The journal Impact Factor was found to significantly associate with increased citations in all three areas. The impact and the number of cited references and their average citation impact also significantly associate with higher article citation impact. Individual and international teamwork give a citation advantage in Biology & Biochemistry and Chemistry but inter-institutional teamwork is not important in any of the three subject areas. Abstract readability is also not significant or of no practical significance. Among the article size features, abstract length significantly associates with increased citations but the number of keywords, title length and paper length are insignificant or of no practical significance. In summary, at least some aspects of collaboration, journal and document properties significantly associate with higher citations. The results provide new and particularly strong statistical evidence that the authors should consider publishing in high impact journals, ensure that they do not omit relevant references, engage in the widest possible team working, when appropriate, and write extensive abstracts. A new finding is that whilst is seems to be useful to collaborate and to collaborate internationally, there seems to be no particular need to collaborate with other institutions within the same country. IntroductionDuring an academic career, scholars make numerous choices about the type of research to conduct, how to present their research, and where to submit it for publication. It seems logical that researchers should aim to conduct the highest possible impact research in order to make the most of their talents and opportunities. Whilst the key decisions for this aim are likely to be specific to the topics researched, there are some more peripheral factors that are nevertheless relevant and that academics may also need to consider in order to maximise the impact of their efforts.Citation counts are widely acknowledged as the main scientific research impact indicator and empirical studies have been carried out to seek associations between citation counts and various objective and easily measurable properties of research. These include the impact of the publishing journal (Boyack & Klavans, 2005), collaboration (Gazni & Didegah, 2010)...

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This study investigates a range of metrics available when a nanoscience and nanotechnology article is published to see which metrics correlate more with the number of citations to the article. It also introduces the degree of internationality of journals and references as new metrics for this purpose. The journal impact factor; the impact of references; the internationality of authors, journals, and references; and the number of authors, institutions, and references were all calculated for papers published in nanoscience and nanotechnology journals in the Web of Science from 2007 to 2009. Using a zero-inflated negative binomial regression model on the data set, the impact factor of the publishing journal and the citation impact of the cited references were found to be the most effective determinants of citation counts in all four time periods. In the entire 2007 to 2009 period, apart from journal internationality and author numbers and internationality, all other predictor variables had significant effects on citation counts.

This study examines a range of factors associated with future citation and altmetric counts to a paper. The factors include journal impact factor, individual collaboration, international collaboration, institution prestige, country prestige, research funding, abstract readability, abstract length, title length, number of cited references, field size, and field type and will be modeled in association with citation counts, Mendeley readers, Twitter posts, Facebook posts, blog posts, and news posts. The results demonstrate that eight factors are important for increased citation counts, seven different factors are important for increased Mendeley readers, eight factors are important for increased Twitter posts, three factors are important for increased Facebook posts, six factors are important for increased blog posts, and five factors are important for increased news posts. Journal impact factor and international collaboration are the two factors that significantly associate with increased citation counts and with all altmetric scores. Moreover, it seems that the factors driving Mendeley readership are similar to those driving citation counts. However, the altmetric events differ from each other in terms of a small number of factors; for instance, institution prestige and country prestige associate with increased Mendeley readers and blog and news posts, but it is an insignificant factor for Twitter and Facebook posts. The findings contribute to the continued development of theoretical models and methodological developments associated with capturing, interpreting, and understanding altmetric events.

This paper measures social media activity of 15 broad scientific disciplines indexed in Scopus database using Altmetric.com data. First, the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database is investigated, overall and across disciplines. Second, the correlation between the bibliometric and altmetric indices is examined using Spearman correlation. Third, a zero-truncated negative binomial model is used to determine the association of various factors with increasing or decreasing citations. Lastly, the effectiveness of altmetric indices to identify publications with high citation impact is comprehensively evaluated by deploying Area Under the Curve (AUC) -an application of receiver operating characteristic. Results indicate a rapid increase in the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database from 10.19% in 2011 to 20.46% in 2015. A zero-truncated negative binomial model is implemented to measure the extent to which different bibliometric and altmetric factors contribute to citation counts. Blog count appears to be the most important factor increasing the number of citations by 38.6% in the field of Health Professions and Nursing, followed by Twitter count increasing the number of citations by 8% in the field of Physics and Astronomy. Interestingly, both Blog count and Twitter count always show positive increase in the number of citations across all fields. While there was a positive weak correlation between bibliometric and altmetric indices, the results show that altmetric indices can be a good indicator to discriminate highly cited publications, with an encouragingly AUC= 0.725 between highly cited publications and total altmetric count. Overall, findings suggest that altmetrics could better distinguish highly cited publications.

This study explores science communication on Twitter by investigating a sample of tweets referring to academic papers in five different scientific fields. The specifications of science communicators on Twitter, the characteristics of those who initiate actions (by tweeting), the extent and quality of reactions (retweeting), individual and group interactions, and the distribution of tweets across types of engagement in the process of science communication (i.e., dissemination, consultation, and evaluation) were explored. A broad array of actors is involved in the communication of science on Twitter, with individual citizens and individual researchers playing an important role. In principle, this is promising for creating direct interaction, which can be difficult through more traditional mass media. The vast majority of communication activities regarding academic papers is undigested dissemination with almost no sign of debate, contestation, or collective reflection. Another general finding of this study is that bot accounts play a major role in the science communication landscape on Twitter.

Scientific articles available in Open Access (OA) have been found to attract more citations and online attention to the extent that it has become common to speak about OA Altmetrics Advantage. This research investigates how the OA Altmetrics Advantage holds for a specific case of research articles, namely the research outputs from universities in Finland. Furthermore, this research examines disciplinary and platform specific differences in that (dis)advantage. The new methodological approaches developed in this research focus on relative visibility, i.e. how often articles in OA journals receive at least one mention on the investigated online platforms, and relative receptivity, i.e. how frequently articles in OA journals gain mentions in comparison to articles in subscription-based journals. The results show significant disciplinary and platform specific differences in the OA advantage, with articles in OA journals within for instance veterinary sciences, social and economic geography and psychology receiving more citations and attention on social media platforms, while the opposite was found for articles in OA journals within medicine and health sciences. The results strongly support field-and platform-specific considerations when assessing the influence of journal OA status on altmetrics. The new methodological approaches used in this research will serve future comparative research into OA advantage of scientific articles over time and between countries.