Another Approach to Evaluating Scientific Collaboration

Purpose: This paper presents another approach to evaluating scientific collaborations. Design/methodology/approach: Weaknesses of existing schemes used in measuring scientific collaborations were identified and discussed. The identified weaknesses were used as basis to identify other parameters useful in measuring collaboration. With these parameters, a new relationship to quantify collaboration was introduced and applied to measure individual collaborations of academic staff of Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden; Netherlands Findings: Overall, the result shows that, total number of publications, number of collaborators per publication and the relative position of the collaborators in the published research are very important in the measurement of scientific Collaboration. Originality/value: The approach in the new scheme introduces a new feature which considers the position of scientists in the author list of their published works. With this perspective, the study is original, and has great potentials.