Assessing the impact of collaborative authorship in Business Economics in Latin America

In this paper we analyze the evolution of Latin American (LATAM) Business Economics (BE) publications in international journals from 2005 to 2019. Using publications in Web of Science Core Collection (WoS), we analyze which characteristics of collaboration result in higher impact, i.e., total number of citations, and journals’ WoS impact factor. Our findings show that the number of publications in journals indexed in the WoS by researchers in LATAM have been rising in terms of the number of publications and impact measured by citations. Moreover, researchers in the region are publishing in journals with higher impact factor. The analysis shows that the main drivers of impact are multilateral and bilateral collaboration, number of countries, number of authors, and the number of categories of knowledge. Specifically, multilateral collaboration is a key factor of influential papers. Other aspects that increase the impact of publications are publishing in English and collaborating with authors from the United States. Our results also suggest a slight decrease in the impact as the number of coauthors increase.