Research collaboration and production of excellence: Finland 1995-2009

This study describes a novel method of assessing credit for authorship and citations received, and argues that conventional bibliometric assessments used for policy development lead to misguided conclusions about how best research is created, and what type policies may promote research excellence. Exploring Finnish research 1995-2009 based on ISI data, we demonstrate that the nature of the Finnish "hot papers" or research frontiers (papers that receive most citations within two years after publication) doesn't correspond with the idealized vision of "high quality research", being highly national and created by relatively small author teams. As such, it also resembles closely research with no impact, i.e. the non-cited papers. These two differ from the "other cited papers", which are authored by larger and highly international teams. While we describe the author team structure and national nature for different cohorts of scientific excellence, our central result is the observation that in terms production of excellence, whole citations created per author, small Finnish author teams are slightly more productive than large international author teams. We discuss at some length the methodological and policy implications of our results, especially as far as they give rise to the suspicion that conventional (Finnish) policy efforts to foster research excellence target the middle-tier papers and target poorly the best papers that resemble closely the worst ones. We also demonstrate how results and conclusions are highly dependent whether research excellence assessment focuses on papers or alternatively researchers. Finally, we consider how "scientific excellence" should be defined and measured in national contexts.