Does research collaboration influence the “disruption” of articles? Evidence from neurosciences

A new indicator (the disruption index) quantifying the extent to which a paper disrupts or consolidates established knowledge was recently introduced from the perspective of subsequent use of the current knowledge. This study explored whether different types of collaboration (i.e., at the author, institution, and country levels) equally affect the disruption of papers. We selected 505,168 papers from Neurosciences indexed in the Web of Science from 1954–2011 and employed logistic regression analysis. Our principal findings are that team size and international collaboration are negatively associated with the disruption of articles, while an additional increase in the number of domestic institutions of a team statistically favors disruption.