Collaboration to success in research

Collaboration is an important theme in technology management, especially for the management of science and technology research. Many studies on the benefits of research collaboration have demonstrated that collaboration increases researchers´ output as well as the quality of them. The purpose of this study is to examine the collaboration pattern of influential researchers through a quantitative method. We use the mainstream index, m-index for short, as the proxy for a researcher´s long-term influence within a scientific field. The m-index expresses the level of association of a researcher´s works with the mainstream of knowledge development in a specific scientific field. The value of researcher´s m-index is tested with several parameters related to collaboration, which are embedded in the paper-author affiliation network. We select data envelopment analysis (DEA) as the scientific field of study. The analysis results show that the number of distinct collaborators and the extent to which a researcher co-publishes with the same collaborators on two or more papers are positively correlated with the m-index. The average number of each paper´s co-authors is nevertheless negatively correlated with the m-index. All these results together suggest that influential scientific researchers collaborate with many other researchers, yet each time do so only with a small number of collaborators who are mostly the partners they collaborate repeatedly with.