Copublication analysis – what is it?

For a copublication analysis we use information about who wrote the article and where they were active when they wrote it as a proxy for the research institution or country involved.

However, the quality of this data in the Web of Science is limited. Different people may publish under the same name, and some researchers (especially those with a double family name) may be published under many different name forms. Also the quality of addresses may bee of varying level with dozens of different versions of for example Karolinska Institutet.

Using the information in the addresses field, we can for instance look at co-publication at the country level. This kind of list is useful when assessing the level of international collaboration.

We can also look at the different authors in the publications and list the most frequent co-authors. Combining author and address information, we can also see who at Karolinska Institutet publish together with which organizations in one specific country or within any other subset of publications we can define, such as a subject field or a specific set of journals.

Using the information in the addresses field, we can look at co-publication at the organizational level, for example all KI publications together with Chinese organizations. This kind of analysis is useful for finding potential organizations for a formalized cooperation, or to evaluate already active cooperation agreements.

Within Karolinska Institutet we can use the higher data quality ensured by the verification process where we get to know the different namestrings to an individual researcher and the standardized affiliation of every publication in order to do copublication analysis with much more detail than otherwise possible.