Page 43 - Becoming Metric Wise

32 Becoming Metric-Wise

Gordon (1980) proved that the probability of acceptance (of a submis-
sion to a journal) increases with the number of authors. Oromaner (1975)
found an increasing relation between the number of authors and the
number of received citations. Waltman, Tijssen, and van Eck (2011) stud-
ied coauthorship in terms of the average geographic distance of their
institutes and found that this average has increased considerably over the
past 30 years.
Given the rise of collaborative research, voices are raised to abolish the
notion of authorship, and to replace it by the notion of contributor,
implying a continuum of activities, instead of the notion of author, which
implies a yes-no situation, see Rennie and Yank (1998). When supporting
this model, colleagues often refer to end credits such as those used in the
film industry. These credits list all the people involved in the production
of a film, starting with the leading actors, the film director, and followed
by the whole crew consisting of editors, writers, stand-ins, photographers,
costume designers, set decorators, digital effects computer teams, prop
masters, gaffers, and so on.

2.3.6 Invisible Colleges

Groups of colleagues that follow each other’s work closely may be said to
form a so-called invisible college. Modern use of this term was intro-
duced by Price (1963, 1986). Yet, its original use dates from the 17th
century when the Royal Society of London was founded. Members often
did not belong to a formal institution and hence referred to themselves as
an invisible college, because of their geographic proximity, regular meet-
ings and shared interests (Zuccala, 2006). Price observed that although
great artists and researchers are both intensely creative humans, the artist’s
creation is personal, while the scientist needs recognition by peers. For
this reason scientists devised an informal mechanism to stay in (almost)
daily contact with a group of peers. According to Price such an invisible
college is composed at most of one hundred colleagues. Yet, Price just
offered a rather vague description and not a precise definition. Studying
the use of the term over the years led Zuccala (2006) to the following
definition:

An invisible college is a set of interacting scholars or scientists who share simi-
lar research interests concerning a subject specialty, who often produce publi-
cations relevant to this subject and who communicate both formally and
informally with one another to work towards important goals in the subject.