The Trends to Multi-Authorship and International Collaborative in Ecology Papers

Introduction The global number of papers published in different areas has increased over the years (King, 2004). Moreover, the science has experimented changes in academic production scenarios, such as decreased number of solo and increased team authors over the years (Nabout et al., 2015). For many a researcher the number of authors is one measure of collaborations (Price, 1958). In fact the collaboration has promoted strong changes in science, and there are different reasons for collaboration: increased publication quality (Padial et al., 2010), and sharing costs and ideas (Vermeulen, Parker & Penders, 2013). For Ecology, complex questions such as global climate change, conservation plans of biodiversity among others, have promoted collaboration between scientists (Nabout et al., 2015). Moreover, there are different possible levels of colaboration and an important paper of Katz & Martin (1997) addresses this issue. For these authors, collaboration is: “Thus, a 'research collaboration' could be defined as the working together of researchers to achieve the common goal of producing new scientific knowledge.” (Katz & Martin, 1997) In general, the collaboration can be interor intraat different spatial scales (e.g. national or international; intra or interinstitutional). This variation indicates levels of collaboration. Therefore, collaborations can occur between researchers from the same institution, between institutions of the same country and between different countries (Katz & Martin, 1997). Several methods have been proposed to measure the collaboration and using different units (researchers, institutes). The aim of this study is to investigate the temporal trends of number of authors in Ecology journals between 1945 until 2014. Moreover, we will investigate the influence of level of collaboration (intra-institution II; between-institutions BI and between-countries BC) in scientific quality (i.e. number of citation of paper). Our hypothesis is that collaborative papers (BC) generate more citations.