Multilateral co-authorship: an important but easily overlooked pattern in international scientific collaboration research

A recent study published in Scientometrics used publications in Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection to exam the decades-long scientific collaboration between Cuba and China (Ronda-Pupo, Scientometrics 129:785–802, 2024). Ronda-Pupo’s finding of the significant growth of research collaboration between these two countries evidenced by the number of co-authored papers is different from our daily perception of the scientific collaboration between China and Cuba. By using the same data, we find the dominating role of multilateral co-authorship rather than bilateral or trilateral co-authorship in Cuba-China scientific collaboration. This important finding gives an alternative explanation of the increasing Cuba-China co-authored publications. Through the supplement of our exploration, readers can have a better understanding of the Cuba-China scientific collaboration.