The scaling relationship between citation-based performance and international collaboration of Cuban articles in natural sciences

The aim of this paper is to extend our knowledge about the power-law relationship between citation-based performance and collaboration patterns for papers by analyzing its behavior at the level of a national science system. We analyzed 3012 Cuban articles on Natural Sciences that received 17,295 citations. The number of articles published through collaboration accounted for 94%. The collaborative articles accounted for 96% of overall citations. The citation-based performance and international collaboration patterns exhibit a power-law correlation with a scaling exponent of 1.22 ± 0.08. Citations to a field’s research internationally collaborative articles in Natural Sciences tended to increase 2^1.22 or 2.33 times each time it doubles the number of internationally collaborative papers. The Matthew Effect is stronger for internationally collaborative papers than for domestic collaborative articles.