OPPOSING INCENTIVES FOR RESEARCH COLLABORATION – A CASE-STUDY Charlotte Wien, Asger Væring Larsen and Bertil Dorch – University Library of Southern Denmark 0000-0002-3257-2084 0000-0002-9967-2637 0000-0003-2594-6778 The Danish Bibliometric Research Indicator (BFI) is part of the performance-based model for the distribution of a special pool of baseline funding for universities and public research institutions in Denmark. BFI rewards the research publications published in the most recognized scientific journals, and gives a bonus for publications done through inter-institutionary collaboration. Credits given to universities are fractionalized between the participating universities. So far credits are not assigned to the individual authors but only to their institutions. However, it turns out that research collaboration is associated with a higher number of citations than single authorship which may present the author with two opposing incentives for research collaboration. University of Southern Denmark has been quite successful in its strategy: According to data from SciVal the number of publications per year has been steadily increasing. From 2010 to 2015 there has been a steady increase in the number of publications where one or more authors were affiliated with University of Southern Denmark: 2010 the university produced 1873 publications – in 2015 this had increased to more than 3000. However, while the number of publications has increased, so has the average number of authors per publication. Data drawn from PURE confirm this picture. We chose University of Southern Denmark (www.sdu.dk) as case. SDU comprises five main fields: Humanities, Science, Engineering, Social Sciences and Health Sciences. The number of researchers is approximately 1,200 and the university has about 18,000 students. Over the recent years it has been ranked between number 300-350 on lists like THE and QS. According to its strategy which was formulated in 2012 one of its primary goals is to forward faculty’s participation in international cooperation including sharing of authorships. As such, our home institution seems to be quite a ‘typical case’ in the Nordic countries. It is argued in the evaluation report of the Danish BFI that the influence of the BFI is strongest at the universities where the BFI is used for distribution of funds internally. The reason for this is that the individual faculty members then feel more inclined to understand the system and thus becomes capable of using it. At University of Southern Denmark since BFI is used for budgetary purposes internally (Sievertsen and Schneider 2012:34). Thus studying University of Southern Denmark provides a so-called ‘most likely scenario’. Data from Pure was extracted using the built-in report module. The number of peer reviewed research articles and reviews, number of internal and external authors on those publications, and publication year was recorded. The data were saved in excel format and will be made available at time of publication of this article. SciVal (www.scival.com) was used to extract publication data from 2010 to 2015 from the Scopus database. We recorded the publication type, publication year and number of authors. We only extracted data for articles, letters, reviews and conference papers. The list of publications was stripped of duplicate publications based on DOI and title. In case a duplicate had different publication type e.g. article and conference paper the article was kept as the analysis is only concerned with articles. Bibliography: Aboukhalil, R. (2015). "The rising trend in authorship." The Winnower. Biggs, S. (2013). "Editorial: R and K strategies and the proliferation of scientific papers." Pacific Conservation Biology 19(2): 92-93. Faurbæk, L. (2008). "Notat til: Styregruppen for den bibliometriske forskningsindikator." 14-07-2016, from http://ufm.dk/forskning-og-innovation/statistik- og-analyser/den-bibliometriske-forskningsindikator/fraktionering/beslutning-