Collaborative characteristics and networks of national, institutional and individual contributors using highly cited articles in environmental engineering in Science Citation Index Expanded

Collaboration has strongly intensified recently and its characteristics are attractive and multidimensional. This study explored the trends, characteristics and citation impact of collaboration as well as collaboration networks for the macrolevel of country, the mesolevel of institution and the microlevel of author, using highly cited articles in environmental engineering (EE) category of the Science Citation Index Expanded. A data visualization and manipulation software, Gephi 0.9.1 was used to visualize the relationships of collaboration among authors, institutions and countries. Although collaboration in general is known to be beneficial in many research areas, collaboration is not beneficial for highly cited research in the EE field. Single author, single country and single institution articles were more visible than articles involving international collaboration, interinstitutional collaboration and individual collaboration. There were certain group collaborations, which played an important role in publishing highly cited articles in the EE field.