Several strategies are used by researchers and research facilities to increase their
scientific production and consequent research quality. Bibliometric records show that
coauthorship and the number of participating organizations in research publications
are steadily increasing; however, the effect of collaboration varies across disciplines,
and the corresponding author’s country appears to influence research impact. This
finding inspired our research question for this study: How does international cooperation
affect scientific impact, and does the affiliation of corresponding authors influence
citation impact indicators at the level of individual publications? To this end, we
provide a comparative evaluation of research articles published in Q1 journals among
Visegrad Group countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) in Medical
and Health sciences between 2017 and 2021. The study investigates the relationship
between collaboration type (national vs. international) and scientific impact (impact
factor of the journal and category normalized citation impact or research papers),
as well as the impact of the country of the corresponding author’s affiliation on
quantitative quality of individual papers. We show that Q1 research papers in international
collaboration have a higher scientific impact than papers published in national partnerships.
Moreover, the corresponding authors’ country of affiliation significantly affects
scientific impact.
