Key factors and considerations in the assessment of international collaboration: a case study for Austria and six countries

This bibliometric study on the collaboration of Austria and six target countries (Slovenia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Denmark, Switzerland and Israel) reveals the importance of differentiation between the bilateral and multilateral contingents in the assessment of international scientific collaboration. For this purpose a “degree of bilaterality” (DB) and a “citation degree of bilaterality” (CDB) are introduced. In our findings the DB and the CDB have values lower than 1/3 and 1/5, respectively. Therefore, the total collaboration is mostly shaped in its volume and impact by the multilateral contingent. Regarding the impact estimation of the collaboration publication output, a multi-faceted approach was used. It is recommended to separately analyze the following three aspects: the un-cited range, the average range and the excellence range. Considering different country specific parameters the total number of publications and citations were resized for each type of collaboration and the results discussed. Only a very weak correlation between ‘times cited’ and the number of affiliations or authors was observed at publication level. Neither the number of authors or affiliations determines impact increase. Rather internationalisation and cooperation seem to be the crucial factors.