Scientific collaboration is more and more common in scientific knowledge production. It has been widely investigated through quantitative and qualitative ways recently. However, most quantitative methods purely based on co-author information usually fail to dig deeper into the internal interaction between collaborators as contributors, which fails to observe internal interactions between collaborators. In this study, we investigated how collaborators in teams work together to perform their research by understanding how two collaborators work together as partners which the traditional collaborative network usually overlooked naturally. By collecting author information from Scopus and author contribution statements from PLoS, we take the biology subject as an example and have examined more than 120,000 research articles and found that division of labor is quite common in scientific collaboration; that partnership as a form of division of labor is widely observed in our dataset; and that the diversity in contributing tasks between partners is generally mild. This study will shed light on understanding the mechanism in scientific collaboration via division of labor that co-authorship studies widely overlook. It helps us create research teams with higher levels of engagement and communication.
Scientific collaboration is more and more common in
scientific knowledge production. It has been widely
investigated through quantitative and qualitative ways
[
Thus, in this preliminary study, we collected author information from Scopus and author contribution statements from PLoS, we took the biology subject as an example and examined more than 120,000 research articles to examine partnership in scientific collaboration from three perspectives: ratio, strength, and diversity. This study and the study to come will help shed light on understanding the mechanism in scientific collaboration via division of labor that studies via co-authorship widely overlooked. It might help us create research teams with higher levels of engagement and communication.
2.1
Data
To examine the phenomenon of partnership in
scientific collaborations, we collected 126,894 articles in
the Biology domain from PLoS (Public Library of
Science) from 2006 to 2020 with their author
contribution statements. The yearly distribution of the articles
we collected is shown in Fig.1. The plot suggests that
the distribution generally followed an increasing
trend except in 2015 and 2016, we double-checked the
data and found that the PLoS journals did not label
subject information for their papers in these two years,
so we failed to include the biology papers in these
years from the whole collections.
Following previous studies[
Given that PLoS did not adopt the CRediT1 taxonomy until 2016, we manually labeled around 99.5% of author-defined tasks according to the taxonomy with 1 http://credi.niso.org/ detailed definition for each role. For each piece of author-defined tasks, we might assign more than one standard contribution role(see Table 1). For those contributions that cannot be standardized using the taxonomy, we label them as "Other". The rest, around 0.5 percent, of author-defined tasks, we automatically label them as "UNKNOWN" for we did not mannually label them. Considering the amount of this part of data is quite small, the potential side effect of them on the whole study could be ignored. With the multi-labeling tactic, we can expand our data, resulting in 5,154 more author-task pairs. = =
= ℎ ℎ
(1) (2) (3)
are connected when doing research via the number of
tasks two collaborators collaborated in a study. The
figure demonstrates that on average the total edge
weights of CCNs are 2.09, which means on average,
two collaborators collaborate two divided tasks in
each study. It also suggests that some collaborators in
teams might be more involved in collaboration than
others, indicating the existance of the partnership in
scientific collaboration. Given that the average weight
of CCNs is as double as those measured in CANs. And
CCNs are naturally sparser than CANs as suggested
by[
In this preliminary study, we investigated how collaborators in teams work together to perform their research by understanding how two collaborators work together as partners which the traditional collaborative network usually overlooked naturally. By collecting author information from Scopus and author contribution statements from PLoS, we take the biology subject as an example and have examined more than 120,000 research articles and found that division of labor is quite common in scientific collaboration; that partnership as a form of division of labor is widely observed in our dataset; and that the diversity in contributing tasks between partners is generally mild. This study will shed light on understanding the mechanism in scientific collaboration via division of labor that coauthorship studies widely overlook. It helps us create research teams with higher levels of engagement and communication.
This article is an outcome of the youth project "Study of Scientific Collaborators’ Scientific Effectiveness from The Perspective of Division of Labor" (ID: 72004054) supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the project "The Causal Effect of Team Diversity on Team Performance" supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (ID: B220201058).