Research contribution pattern analysis of multinational authorship papers

Most research evaluations in the past adopted simple counting method to calculate the number of collaborative countries within a paper, however, the information related to the author is either neglected or excluded. Therefore, this study takes the “author” as the unit of analysis to conduct a country-level research evaluation, which mainly focus on the global publishing trend of multinational authorship papers, and their research contribution patterns that derived from the transformation of author roles. It also compares the citation impact of the four contribution patterns between China and the United States. The findings revealed that multinational authorship has become a growing trend, and China had the highest number of multinational authorship papers among all the studied nations. As for the research contribution patterns, the numbers of the dominant and the supervisory pattern papers continue to increase, while the primary and the contributory pattern papers are gradually decreasing. However, China is different from other countries. China has a high proportion of dominant, supervisory and primary pattern papers, which suggests that China gradually plays a critical role in international scientific collaboration. Nonetheless, a high degree of dominance or leadership in scientific collaboration activities does not translate into high citation impacts. It is only until 2016 that the citation impact of China’s supervisory papers exceeded the United States, as well as the dominant and primary papers in 2018. As for the contributory papers, the performance of the United States was far ahead for the past decade.