Governmental funding agencies and international non-governmental organizations promote collaborative research programs. One of their main arguments is the benefits for increasing scientific productivity. According to specialized literature, when scientific collaborations support the multi-disciplinary dimensions, they promote the development of techno-scientific production in different fields of action. In this way, the growing interest in productivity indicators of scientific collaborations was unfolded and the indicators based on citation analysis are the best known ones. Nevertheless, how much of the measures based on this kind of analysis can reveal the effects of scientific collaboration on the production and content of scientific knowledge? So, the aim of this paper is to discuss the limits of citation analysis to evaluate initiatives of collaborative scientific research based on the propositions of specialized literature.
collaborative research; scientific research; productivity; scientometry; science statistics