Research Unit Size and Internal Co-publications

Scientific collaboration within a research unit (team, laboratory, group, etc.) has caught scientometricians' attention. Science of team science recently emerged to use science to understand the best ways researchers are jointly organized to perform science in order to increase their performance as well as to suggest relevant strategies to support effective science teams. This paper contributes to this field of science by analyzing to which extent internal collaboration outputs of a research unit is influenced by its size, i.e. number of academics. Therefore, 120 accredited units composed of about 1,500 researchers located within four universities in Morocco are analyzed in this paper. A cross-matrix of members' co-publications is built for each unit. An index of intra-collaboration and an internal co-publication indicator are calculated to assess both size and internal research output at the unit's level. Furthermore, the Lorenz curve is being used to draw equality/inequality of the internal co-publication with respect to unit's size. The results indicate low internal co-publications for larger research units with an inequality in the distribution of these publications in favor of small size units.

Automated summary

This study analyzes 120 accredited research units within four universities in Morocco and finds that larger research units have lower internal co-publications, with an unequal distribution of these publications in favor of smaller units.