Comparison and Trends in Research Collaboration: Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Centers Co-Authorship Network Properties, 1999-2015

Okamoto J, Stipelman, B.A., Huang, G., & Hall, K.L.. Comparison and Trends in Research Collaboration: Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Centers Co-Authorship Network Properties, 1999-2015. Poster presentation at Sixth Annual International Science of Team Science Conference. Bethesda, MD. Jun 2015.

This analysis updates and compliments a quasiexperimental, longitudinal study conducted to compare bibliometric indicators of collaboration and productivity from a center-based transdisciplinary team-based research initiative with traditional investigator-initiated R01 grants (see Hall et al., 2012 for the original study). Publication data were collected for all grants from the longitudinal study, which included publications for the time period between 1999 and the end of 2014. Coauthorship networks were extracted and compared across time to determine patterns and detect differences among the three study groups, which included center-based grants (TTURC), long-term R01 grants spanning 10 years or more (LR01), and standard 5-year R01 grants (SR01). Results confirm and support previous analyses from the study by Hall and colleagues in 2012, which reported a time-lag in productivity for the center-based grants, which eventually out-produced the traditional grants by the end of the 10-year funding period. Co-authorship network ties and number of authors in the network was greater for the two R01 groups through the mid-point of the original 10- year period, but leveled off around that time. The number of authors in the center-based network steadily increased across time until eclipsing the R01 groups. The number of co-authorship network ties began to dramatically increase in the center-based network around the mid-point, which ended up with 2½ times the number of network ties than the largest R01 network. While the center-based group out-produced the traditional R01 groups in publications, the distribution of the weight of co-authorship ties did not differ between the three groups. This indicates that the greater number of publications was not solely a result of a few groups of highly productive research teams in the center-based initiative. For all groups, the vast majority of co-authorship ties, between 70-80% of all ties, occurred just once. These findings demonstrate the highly collaborative nature of center-based grant initiative and suggest a greater diversity of co-authors could result in greater publication productivity.

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