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 citation-based performance and coauthorship patterns in papers in the natural sciences. We analyzed 829,924 articles that received 16,490,346 citations. The number of articles published through coauthorship accounts for 89%. The citation-based performance and coauthorship 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 doubled the number of coauthored 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 doubled the number of single-authored papers. The Matthew Effect is stronger for coauthored papers than for single-authored. In fact, with a scaling exponent <1.0 the impact of single-authored papers exhibits a cumulative disadvantage or inverse Matthew Effect.