Scientific collaboration of authors in Payesh Journal from 2012-2019

Scientific collaboration among medical authors is growing. Due to the role of scientific collaboration in improvement of quality and quantity of scientific outputs, the aim of this study was to reflect the scientific collaboration among the authors in Payesh Journal (PJ).

In this scientometric study, all published articles of PJ (a medical journal published by Iranian Institute for Health Sciences Research: ACECR) during 2012-2019 were evaluated. The articles were assessed in terms of the frequency of authors, average number of authors per article, most prolific universities/institutions and authors, intra- and inter-university collaboration, frequency of gender and group collaboration coefficient between authors. To answer hypotheses, the data were analyzed using SPSS.23 and Chi-square.

The results showed that 2206 authors contributed to the writing of 505 published articles. The average number of authors per articles was 4.49. The scientific collaboration coefficient was 0.73. Only 8 (1.5%) of articles were written by single author, and the dominant pattern in co-authorship was four-author article. There was a statistically significant difference between the gender of the first author and number of authors (P value <0.05). The number of authors was higher in articles in which the women were the first authors than in other articles.

Consequently, the scientific collaboration among authors of PJ is in appropriate level. Due to the importance of other collaboration patterns, further studies are needed on PJ to determine a more comprehensive status of scientific collaboration in this Journal and to provide effective policies to its officials.