Quantifying the degree of research collaboration: A comparative study of collaborative measures

This article reports a comparative study of five measures that quantify the degree of research collaboration, including the collaborative index, the degree of collaboration, the collaborative coefficient, the revised collaborative coefficient, and degree centrality. The empirical results showed that these measures all capture the notion of research collaboration, which is consistent with prior studies. Moreover, the results showed that degree centrality, the revised collaborative coefficient, and the degree of collaboration had the highest coefficient estimates on research productivity, the average JIF, and the average number of citations, respectively. Overall, this article suggests that the degree of collaboration and the revised collaborative coefficient are superior measures that can be applied to bibliometric studies for future researchers. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.