Purpose: The paper investigates the relationship between research funding and its impact on co-authorship and journal selection in the social sciences, specifically in communication, political science, and sociology. It examines whether funded research projects are associated with more co-authors and higher journal prestige, revealing that funded papers generally involve larger teams, and are published in more prestigious journals, with some exceptions in sociology. Design/methodology/approach: The study employs a quantitative content analysis research design, examining 1,091 articles across the fields of communication, political science, and sociology. It employs statistical techniques, including a Mann-Whitney U test, chi-square goodness-of-fit test, and chi-square test of independence, to assess the relationship between research funding, the number of co-authors, and journal quartile rankings. Findings: The main findings reveal that funded papers typically have more co-authors and are more likely to be published in prestigious journals, especially in communication and political science. However, sociology shows no significant link between funding and journal prestige. Across all disciplines, non-funded papers are more common, reflecting the general underfunding of social sciences. Practical implications: The results suggest that research funding can significantly enhance collaboration and increase the likelihood of publication in prestigious journals, emphasizing the need for more targeted funding in social sciences to boost research quality and visibility. Policymakers and funding agencies should consider these dynamics when allocating resources to ensure that underfunded disciplines, like sociology, receive adequate support to enhance their academic and societal impact. Additionally, researchers may benefit from seeking funding opportunities that facilitate larger, more diverse collaborations. Social implications: The study's findings highlight the broader social implications of unequal research funding, which can exacerbate disparities in knowledge production and dissemination. The overrepresentation of funded research in prestigious journals may reinforce existing power structures, limiting the visibility of non-funded but potentially impactful research. Addressing these imbalances could lead to a more diverse and equitable academic landscape, fostering innovation and inclusive knowledge that better reflects a wider range of societal needs and perspectives. Originality/value: The primary value of this study lies in its empirical evidence, which has the potential to enhance future social science research practices. Additionally, it highlights how targeted financial support can promote more diverse, impactful, and socially responsible research.

Several strategies are used by researchers and research facilities to increase their scientific production and consequent research quality. Bibliometric records show that coauthorship and the number of participating organizations in research publications are steadily increasing; however, the effect of collaboration varies across disciplines, and the corresponding author’s country appears to influence research impact. This finding inspired our research question for this study: How does international cooperation affect scientific impact, and does the affiliation of corresponding authors influence citation impact indicators at the level of individual publications? To this end, we provide a comparative evaluation of research articles published in Q1 journals among Visegrad Group countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) in Medical and Health sciences between 2017 and 2021. The study investigates the relationship between collaboration type (national vs. international) and scientific impact (impact factor of the journal and category normalized citation impact or research papers), as well as the impact of the country of the corresponding author’s affiliation on quantitative quality of individual papers. We show that Q1 research papers in international collaboration have a higher scientific impact than papers published in national partnerships. Moreover, the corresponding authors’ country of affiliation significantly affects scientific impact.

Universities have undergone a profound transformation to increase their competitiveness and research performance; evaluating their research output and scientific impact is therefore of great importance. This article aims to suggest an approach to analyze how the JIF quartile share of research articles differs among European universities in medical science, and how the byline positions of affiliated and non-affiliated authors can influence an article’s scientific impact. We examined the research output of universities in the Top 5 European and Visegrad Group Countries based on the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Ranking 2022 (University of Oxford, ETH Zurich, Karolinska Institute, Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin, KU Leuven, Semmelweis University, Jagiellonian University, Charles University Prague, and Comenius University Bratislava). We found that the share of Q1 and the less prestigious Q3 and Q4 papers are inversely proportional when plotted against the ranks of universities. Whilst the proportion of Q1 papers is higher for the Top 5 universities, this ratio decreases with a less prominent place in the ranking. The presence of non-affiliated authors in the first, last, and corresponding author byline positions has a significantly positive effect on the Category Normalized Citation Impact, correlating with the position of the university in the ranking. Moreover, the difference in the Category Normalized Citation Impact between papers with affiliated and non-affiliated authors is also specific to university rank.

Collaboration between researchers has been shown to influence their productivity and scientific impact. Although these ties have been widely discussed in the literature, the nature of the co-authorship networks between the most successful scholars remains a question. To provide an answer, this study conducts a cross-case analysis of the collaboration networks between Highly Cited Researchers, focusing on the research output and co-authorship patterns in Highly Cited Papers across three award categories: Clinical Medicine, Materials Science, and Social Sciences. Our findings indicate that there are category-specific differences in publication output and the intensity of collaboration between Highly Cited Researchers. Notably, Highly Cited Researchers in the Social Sciences demonstrate a less collaborative approach to research than those in Clinical Medicine and Materials Science. While Highly Cited Researchers in all three categories featured interconnected collaboration networks among themselves, those in Clinical Medicine and Materials Science exhibited a more collaborative environment, while those in Social Sciences showed a tendency towards independent research efforts. The case of Social Sciences is further evidenced by higher fragmentation within the collaboration network of Social Sciences, indicating a less cohesive collaborative framework. The analysis of the Giant Component—the largest cohesive subset of the network—revealed that it is less representative of the overall network structure in the Social Sciences than in Clinical Medicine and Materials Science. Finally, the centrality measures indicated that Highly Cited Researchers with high betweenness and closeness centrality act as crucial bridges within each network, significantly shaping the structural cohesion and collaborative dynamics of their respective fields.