Effect of the Interaction between Co-author Scale and Paper Characteristics on Paper Citation in Medical Informatics: Bibliometric and Statistical Analysis (Preprint)

Abstract

There is currently no consensus on the impact of a higher co-author scale (the number of authors) on paper citation. No studies have comprehensively explored the interaction effects of co-author scale and paper characteristics on paper citations.

We aimed to determine the interaction effects between co-author scale and paper characteristics on paper citations in medical informatics.

A total of 34,399 papers were included in this study. Highly-cited papers were identified among the top 10% of all published papers in the current year. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to estimate the associations between co-author scale and paper citation.

We found that higher co-author scale was significantly associated with highly-cited papers. Significant independent risk factors were identified using multivariate analysis. A subgroup analysis showed that higher co-author scale significantly increased the probability of a paper becoming highly-cited if it was published in the past 9-14 years (OR = 1.24; 95% CI: 1.03 –1.50), has 20-30 references (OR = 1.38; 95% CI: 1.13 –1.70), was a funded paper (OR = 1.30; 95% CI: 1.11 –1.52), was published in a European journal (OR = 1.22; 95% CI: 1.06 –1.40), or was published in multi-disciplinary (≥5) journals (OR = 1.70; 95% CI: 1.38 –2.08).

Our study demonstrated that there was a statistically significant interaction effect between co-author scale and paper characteristics on paper citation in medical informatics. These results provide further empirical evidence on the association between co-author scale, paper characteristics, and paper citation, and provide suggestions for researchers who are launching new projects.