International collaboration and high citation impact – A case analysis of immunology

Bibliometricians emphasize on international collaboration to enhance the citation impact of research publications. However, Mathew Effect for Countries brings out that the citation impact is not uniformly distributed to all country affiliations. The present study explores whether international collaboration helps in neutralizing the origin of country bias. The study explores this with productivity, author affiliation and citation data from Scopus for the immunology papers for the year 2018. The data considered pertain to India and four comparator countries which are high on international collaboration, namely Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The results point to playout of Mathew Effect and possible confirmation of social constructivist argument of citation practices.