The scaling relationship between citation-based performance and coauthorship patterns in natural sciences

The aim of this paper is to extend our knowledge about the power-law relationship between citationbased performance and collaboration patterns for papers in the natural sciences. We analyzed 829,924 articles that received 16,490,346 citations. The number of articles published through collaboration account for 89%. The citation-based performance and collaboration patterns exhibit a power-law correlation with a scaling exponent of 1.20 ± 0.07. Citations to a subfield’s research articles tended to increase 2.1.20 or 2.30 times each time it doubles the number of collaborative papers. The scaling exponent for the power-law relationship for single-authored papers was 0.85 ± 0.11. The citations to a subfield’s single-authored research articles increased 2.0.85 or 1.89 times each time the research area doubles the number of non-collaborative papers. The Matthew effect is stronger for collaborated papers than for single-authored. In fact, with a scaling exponent < 1.0 the impact of single-author papers exhibits a cumulative disadvantage or inverse Matthew effect.