Letter to the Editor: 'Scientific collaboration and quality of scientific research'

The conclusions you reached in your editorial (Noruzi, 2008) that ‘a published paper resulting from collaborative research has a higher chance of attracting more citations’ might well be right, but not from the data that you presented. In your study you counted the number of co-authored and the number of single-authored papers published from prestigious universities, and the numbers of citations that they received. But it is not correct to conclude from this procedure that co-authoring leads to higher citation rates because, in your study, there were many more co-authored papers. Technically, to test your hypothesis properly, you would need to compare the citation rates of an equal number of co-authored and single-authored papers to arrive at a fair conclusion.