Early-stage reciprocity in sustainable scientific collaboration.

An illustrative example of early-stage reciprocity in scientific collaboration. It shows an extreme case that each collaboration increases Ada's h-index, while Bob does not benefit in h-index increasing all the time. We want to explore how such reciprocity in h-index influences the collaboration sustainability in terms of collaboration times, duration, and collaboration index. • A new way of quantitatively measuring scientific collaboration output, h-index reciprocity, is proposed. • Top scientists tend to have a fairer h-index reciprocity collaboration output. • Sustainable collaborations have a fairer h-index reciprocity than transient collaborations. • It is found that fairness brings about sustainable collaborations. Scientific collaboration is of significant importance in tackling grand challenges and breeding innovations. Despite the increasing interest in investigating and promoting scientific collaborations, we know little about the collaboration sustainability as well as mechanisms behind it. In this paper, we set out to study the relationships between early-stage reciprocity and collaboration sustainability. By proposing and defining h-index reciprocity, we give a comprehensive statistical analysis on how reciprocity influences scientific collaboration sustainability, and find that scholars are not altruism and the key to sustainable collaboration is fairness. The unfair h-index reciprocity has an obvious negative impact on collaboration sustainability. The bigger the reciprocity difference, the less sustainable in collaboration. This work facilitates understanding sustainable collaborations and thus will benefit both individual scholar in optimizing collaboration strategies and the whole academic society in improving teamwork efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]