Collaboration and Productivity: an investigation into 'Scientometrics' journal and 'UHasselt' repository

The paper investigates into the formulations of the relation between collaboration and production. More precisely for a fixed field or institute, is it possible to prove that, higher the number of papers of an author (calculated in the total way), the higher his/her fraction of co-authored papers (with at least one co-author)? The methodology used, consisted of creation of two different data sets. One consisting of articles published in the journal of Scientometrics and the other that of the articles included in the institutional repository of the Universiteit Hasselt (UHasselt). In the first case, the data set was comprised of the articles published in the journal titled 'Scientometrics' from first volume to the latest volume of 2007. The other set belonging to repository consisted of 7,604 articles as accessed on 27.2. 2008. The assertion that high productivity leads to high fractions of co-authored papers (but low productivity can have low or high fractions of co-authored papers) could not be proved in the first case while it did in the second one. This is because of the fact that majority of the papers in the UHasselt repository is in the Sciences, while the journal 'Scientometrics' is more devoted to Social Sciences (at least in the initial few years). Moreover, the collaboration in the case of the UHasselt repository is much higher than in the Scientometrics case. Further, scientific environment was found to be a determining factor of collaboration. Hence, the authors present a production collaboration graph on which comparisons between fields and/or institutes can be made.