Modified collaborative coefficient: a new measure for quantifying the degree of research collaboration

Abstract

Collaborative coefficient (CC) is a measure of collaboration in research, that reflects both the mean number of authors per paper as well as the proportion of multi-authored papers. Although it lies between the values 0 and 1, and is 0 for a collection of purely single-authored papers, it is not 1 for the case where all papers are maximally authored, i.e., every publication in the collection has all authors in the collection as co-authors. We propose a simple modification of CC, which we call modified collaboration coefficient (or MCC, for short), which improves its performance in this respect.