A study of authorship patterns and collaborative research in Sri Lankan Health Research

Abstract

This research presents the findings of a pilot study conducted under ongoing research on authorship patterns and author collaboration patterns of Sri Lankan health research published between 2009-2020. This pilot study addresses few aspects of the principal analysis related to author collaboration of health-related research published in Sri Lanka between 2016 to 2020. A total number of 1644 health-related Sri Lankan research published by Sri Lankan authors indexed in three databases: SCOPUS, PubMed and Embase were selected for the study. According to the results, the total number of published articles shows an increasing trend over the years. The category containing single-author papers showed a minimum contribution (3%), whereas the category containing more than seven authors showed the highest contribution (25.1%). The Average Authors Per Paper (AAPP) shows an increasing trend while the Productivity Per Author (PPA) does not change significantly over time. The degree of author collaboration shows an increasing trend with time, with a higher increase in 2020. By considering the results it can be concluded that author collaboration in Sri Lankan health research is improving over the years, creating a positive picture on the growth of health research. This pilot study only considers the number of papers published and number of authors, to have an idea about author collaboration. However, there are many other factors which to be considered to have a clear idea about the nature of author collaboration which will be addressed through the main study such as local and international researchers’ relationships, regional and global level funding mechanisms, peer review process, health system research areas, and institutional collaboration etc.