On the Impact of Multi-Authorship Scholarly Publications

There are many factors that have been observed to attract more citations. One of the most popular factors is number of authors, often positively associated with an increase in citations. This has caused an increase in authorship count that aims to game the citation system and increase likelihood to be cited more. In turn, indexing and university ranking systems has adopted fractional counting to counter the rampant unnecessary co-authorship. In this work, we assess the impact number of authors has on the citation counts of a university dominated by multi-affiliated collaboration. We use citation counts sourced from Scopus and Web of Science. Our findings show that on average two-authored publications receive 231% more citations when compared to any other co-authorship count. The latter is further ratified when self-citations are excluded. As such, regardless which fractional count policy is adopted by a university ranking agency and knowing that the selected university is largely dominated by multiple affiliations, then the impact of two-authored publications becomes even more influential. Additionally, we observe a negative correlation between citations and co-authorship counts.