1 Introduction

Institutions, universities and even funding bodies make assumptions about the fact that if one publishes more papers, it produces better quality research; if they collaborate more, they become more productive and produce better quality research. They are making causal assumptions between these three factors. This research is aimed to investigate whether these relationships really exist.

4 Institutional collaboration graphs

2 Institutional collaboration model

Cites

Figure 2. The core network of the institutional collaboration is held together by highly ranked and highly collaborative institutions. Colour represents ranking (the greener the higher the ranking); size represents collaboration(bigger is more).

Figure 1. Research collaboration between multiple institutions often takes the form of project. Researchers from multiple institutions come together and work towards a common goal. Productivity --- the total research output of an institution, peer reviewed papers are commonly used to measure research output. eg. the number of papers an institution publishes. Collaboration --- the total collaborated research output of an institution. eg. the number of collaborated papers an institution publishes. Quality --- the quality metrics of an institution. eg. rank of an institution, citation count etc

3 Methods
Using ACM database covering 1950-2010 computer science and ISI data covering 1970-2010 in computer science, materials science, law, psychology and pharmacology. Extracted data describing the institutions in the following aspects: Productivity -- The number of papers published Collaboration The number of collaborative papers published, collaboration index(a combination of collaboration size and collaboration activity) and percentage of collaboration Qualities The published institutions ranking (webometrics), citation count, citation page rank, avg. citations per paper Visualisation techniques employed to show effects intuitively. Pair-wise, partial and part correlation was conducted. Pearson and Spearman Correlations were used to workout the relationship between the variables.

Figure 3. A country homophily can be observed in the international institution collaboration. Most institutions collaborate mainly within its own country. US is a dominant player in institution collaboration. Colour represents the country.

5 Results
Pair-wise correlation shows significant medium to high correlations between collaboration, productivity and quality. This demonstrates that strong relationships exist among the three variables. Partial correlation shows that the percentage of collaborative papers has a negative correlation with productivity. This gives an indication that lower ranked or less equip institution collaborate proportionally more than those top ranked ones. This can be further developed into a metric which evaluates institutions performance.