The Relationship Between Author Collaboration and Research Output Based on Age Structure Distribution

Collaboration has gradually become a norm in scientific research due to the quick development of technology. The relationship between the age structure of scholars and research output has received widespread attention. How to optimize the combination of scholars of different age groups and increase research output has become a highly practical research topic. Based on the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) database and choosing data from the physics discipline from 1970 to 2015, we define the academic age of scholars and cluster the academic age. The scholars are divided into three types, namely young scholars, middle-aged scholars, and senior scholars. The patterns of authors’ collaboration are divided using the maximum and minimum value method. We build a mathematical model to study the relationship between research output and the patterns of authors’ collaboration, and the fitted parameters are statistically analyzed. A robustness test is conducted using the relationship between citations and the patterns of authors, collaboration. In terms of the number of papers published and citations, the largest number of research output is collaboration between young scholars followed by collaboration between young scholars and middle-aged scholars, while collaboration between young scholars and senior scholars is the least. At the same time, we further provide the optimal average academic age for different collaborative patterns.