Power-law relationship between citation based performance and collaboration in articles on management journals: a scale-independent approach

The objective of this article is to determine if academic collaboration is associated with the citation-based performance of articles that are published in management journals. We analyzed 127,812 articles published between 1988 and 2013 in 173 journals on the ISI Web of Science in the “management” category. Collaboration occurred in approximately 60% of all articles. A power–law relationship was found between citation-based performance and journal size and collaboration patterns.The number of citations expected by collaborative articles increases 2^1.89 or 3.7 times when the number of collaborative articles published in a journal doubles. The number of citations expected by non-collaborative articles only increases 2^1.35 or 2.55 times if a journal publishes double the number of non-collaborative articles. The Matthew effect is stronger for collaborative than for non-collaborative articles. Scale-independent indicators increase the confidence in the evaluation of the impact of the articles published in management journals