Does corresponding authorship influence scientific impact in collaboration: Brazilian institutions as a case of study

Abstract

This paper analyses the influence of a Brazilian institution delivering the corresponding author on its scientific citation impact, distinguishing between its collaborative papers with foreign institutions and those resulting from national collaboration. We retrieved from Scopus database a total of 607,454 Brazilian documents for all 443 Brazilian institutions with at least 100 documents published from 2003 to 2015. We evaluated the difference between the normalized citation impact as corresponding author and that as non-corresponding author, applying paired t-tests both for international and for national collaboration. As result, for international collaboration, it was observed that the normalized citation impact achieved by Brazilian institutions depends upon corresponding author status, and that, in case of non-corresponding authorship, the impact shows a significant benefit when the paper has a corresponding author from a foreign institution. In national collaboration, the institutions benefit as non-corresponding author, although the difference is too small to influence the practice of the institutions' scientific policies. Thus, the indicator of corresponding author provides additional information relevant to Brazilian institutions in international collaboration, but not in national institutional co-authorship, which is more influenced by the institution's recognized scientific tradition and publishing strategies/practices.