Exploring the relationship between research impact and collaborations for information science

In this study, we examine whether internal and external collaboration (considering institutional and national levels) among scientific associates with research impact relates to research performance. We extract data from Scopus, a bibliometric database, searching for journal publications having 'information science' phrase in their title or keywords or abstracts and retrieve totally 4,579 publications. Spearman correlation rank test is used to examine the hypotheses. Analysis of collected data shows that publication's impact is significantly and positively associated with collaboration indicators based on authors' affiliations. However, internal collaborations at both institutional and national levels show stronger associations with publications' impact than external collaborations do. © 2012 IEEE.link_to_subscribed_fulltex