Impact of Co-authorship on the Quality of Papers: An Approach to Papers Published in the Field of Knowledge and Information Science from 2008 to 2015

The study aims to investigate the impact of the co-authorship on the research quality in the field of “Knowledge and Information Science”  in 2008-2015.

The present study is a kind of applied study in which survey methods have been adopted for achieving its purpose. The statistical community includes 640 articles published in the Iranian journals of the relevant field between 2008-2015. The selected journals included “journal of academic librarianship and information research”, “journal of information processing and management”, as well as “Astan Quds Razavi journal of library and information science”. Furthermore, 150 articles were selected through simple random sampling and their quality was investigated. Moreover, the quality of title, abstract, introduction, literature review, findings, and conclusion throughout descriptive statistics and the “Pearson correlation coefficient” were analyzed through inferential statistics by SPSS software.

Most of the co-authorship patterns allocate to two-authored papers (39%), and the most utilized document types are Persian articles (50.1%). Besides, the correlation coefficients between the “co-authorship” and the “quality of different sections of a paper” such as the literature review (0.2%) and conclusion (0.18%) are weak. Hence, there is no correlation in the sections of title, abstract, introduction, and findings.

The general quality of various sections of the articles is not desirable. Additionally, the numbers of authors do not affect the paper quality and the research trend.