Proximity and Matthew Effect in co-authorship pattern of Iranian top universities

Co-authorship is used to measure scholarly collaborations of countries, institutions, and individuals. It refers to the process in which two or more authors or researchers collaborate with each other to create a joint-work through collaboration methods and channels. Although many studies have been conducted to analyze the individual or field co-authorships in Iran, a little have concerned the organisational co-authorships in this country. This study aims to analyze organisational coauthorships among Iranian top universities based on proximity rule and Matthew effect. Data were limited to published articles affiliated to top universities in Iran and extracted from the Web of Science (WoS) database. The co-authorship matrix of these universities was shaped and their relationships were mapped. The “National Co-Authorship Index”, which is the rate of scholarly coauthorships among universities of a country, was calculated. Results show that geographic proximity has important and strong role in co-authorships of Iranian top universities. Top universities tend to collaborate with universities of similar ranking and probably this result confirms the Matthew effect in the collaborations of Iranian top universities. Also, the role of collocation or proximity has been drawn on Iran map. Finally, some suggestions were made to improve the co-authorship system of Iranian universities.