The fruits of collaboration in a multidisciplinary field

Abstract

Collaboration between researchers and between research organizations is generally considered a desirable course of action, in particular by some funding bodies. However, collaboration within a multidisciplinary community, such as the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) community, can be challenging. We performed a bibliometric analysis of the CHI conference proceedings to determine if papers that have authors from different organization or countries receive more citations than papers that are authored by members of the same organization. There was no significant difference between these three groups, indicating that there is no advantage for collaboration in terms of citation frequency. Furthermore, we tested if papers written by authors from different organizations or countries receive more best paper awards or at least award nominations. Papers from only one organization received significantly fewer nominations than collaborative papers. © 2010 The Author(s).