发表机构
Universidade Federal do Ceará; Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Ceará; Escola de Saúde Pública do Ceará; Universidade Estadual de Maringá; University of Maribor; Community Healthcare Center Dr. Adolf Drolc Maribor; Kyung Hee University; University College, Korea University; Universidade de São Paulo（塞阿拉联邦大学; 塞阿拉联邦教育、科学和技术学院; 塞阿拉公共卫生学院; 马里纳加州立大学; 马里博尔大学; 马里博尔德拉·阿道夫·德罗尔克社区医疗中心; 庆熙大学; 高丽大学大学院; 圣保罗大学）
机构由 AI 辅助整理，请以论文原文为准。AI 中文总结
本研究通过分析26,876名巴西研究者的职业数据，利用因果发现框架证明生产力是科学合作的基础，而非相反，且这一关系在实验室密集型领域更为显著。
AI 中文摘要
科学生产力与合作密切相关，然而学术生涯中这两个维度之间的因果方向仍不清楚。在此，我们分析了26,876名持有国家著名奖学金、跨多个学科的巴西研究人员的事业轨迹，以检验是生产力塑造了合作，还是反之。聚焦于总发表论文数和不同合著者数量，我们使用基于条件和分布结构不对称性的因果发现框架评估它们的方向关系，以确定更可能的生成方向。以生产力为条件的合作表现出高度规则的均值-方差关系，与几何模型一致，而反向条件则产生远不够连贯的模式。一致地，发表论文数遵循对数正态分布，而合著者分布由几何-对数正态混合重现，其中生产力决定了预期的合著者数量。替代测试表明，数据与生产力塑造合作的方向比相反方向更为兼容。这两个量也以不对称方式累积：发表论文不平等随职业年龄稳步上升，而合著者不平等则不然，表明优势在产出上的复合效应强于网络广度。按领域分解的分析揭示了更细致的图景，尽管合作塑造生产力的方向从未被支持，但在更以实验室和研究小组模式组织的领域中，两个方向的区别最为明显，这些领域中的生产力不平等也增长得最明显。在这一杰出科学家群体中，更大的合作网络因此更可能反映生产力上的累积优势，而非独立地产生更大的产出。
英文摘要
Scientific productivity and collaboration are closely related, yet the causal direction between these two dimensions of academic careers remains unclear. Here we analyze the careers of 26,876 Brazilian researchers holding a nationally prestigious fellowship across multiple disciplines to test whether productivity shapes collaboration or the reverse. Focusing on total publications and distinct coauthors, we assess their directional relationship using a causal discovery framework based on asymmetries in conditional and distributional structure to determine the more plausible generative direction. Collaboration conditioned on productivity exhibits a highly regular mean-variance relation consistent with a geometric model, whereas the reverse conditioning yields a much less coherent pattern. Consistently, publication counts follow a lognormal distribution, whereas the coauthor distribution is reproduced by a geometric-lognormal mixture where productivity determines the expected number of collaborators. Surrogate tests indicate that the data are considerably more compatible with productivity shaping collaboration than with the reverse. The two quantities also accumulate asymmetrically: publication inequality rises steadily with career age, whereas coauthor inequality does not, indicating that advantage compounds more in output than in network breadth. Area-resolved analyses reveal a more nuanced picture, and although the direction where collaboration shapes productivity is never favored, the two directions are most clearly distinguished in areas more organized around laboratory and research-group models, where productivity inequality also grows most clearly. Among this cohort of prominent scientists, larger collaboration networks are thus more likely to reflect cumulative advantage in productivity than to independently generate greater output.
Comments14 two-column pages, 5 figures, supplementary information; accepted for publication in PNAS Nexus
