Incentivizing research collaboration using performance-based reward systems

Despite a growing interest in research collaboration, few studies have examined the influences of policy measures on collaboration practices and on the scientific outcome of the research. By analyzing individual-level panel data of researchers in humanities and social sciences in a Korean university, the present study shows that adopting a partial discount system for the number of coauthors, which has been designed in such a way as to reward coauthored publications, could redirect researchers' attention away from working alone to collaborating with others, as proposed by advocates of team-based incentives in principal-agent theory. In addition, the present study shows that, although collaboration was positively correlated with the impact factors of the journal and the total number of publications, the fractional count of publications, which divides the number of publications by the number of authors, showed a negative relationship with participation in collaboration.