International coauthorship and citation impact: A bibliometric study of six LIS journals, 1980–2008

International collaborative papers are increasingly common in journals of many disciplines. These types of papers are often cited more frequently. To identify the coauthorship trends within Library and Information Science (LIS), this study analyzed 7,489 papers published in six leading publications (ARIST, IP&M, JAMIA, JASIST, MISQ, and Scientometrics) over the last three decades. Logistic regression tested the relationships between citations received and seven factors: authorship type, author's subregion, country income level, publication year, number of authors, document type, and journal title. The main authorship type since 1995 was national collaboration. It was also the dominant type for all publications studied except ARIST, and for all regions except Africa. For citation counts, the logistic regression analysis found all seven factors were significant. Papers that included international collaboration, Northern European authors, and authors in high‐income nations had higher odds of being cited more. Papers from East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Southern Europe had lower odds than North American papers. As discussed in the bibliometric literature, Merton's Matthew Effect sheds light on the differential citation counts based on the authors' subregion. This researcher proposes geographies of invisible colleagues and a geographic scope effect to further investigate the relationships between author geographic affiliation and citation impact.