Proximity rule and Matthew effect in co-authorships of Iranian medical universities

One of the measures which used to calculate the scholarly collaboration of countries and organizations is co-authorship. Co-authorship is a process in which two or more authors/researchers collaborate with each other to create a joint work via collaboration channels and methods. Although many studies have been considered individual or domain co-authorships, but the organizational aspect of this type of collaboration has attracted less attention. Therefore, the aim of this study is to draw the organizational co-authorships among Iranian medical universities and to analyze the role of proximity and Matthew effect in this collaboration. Thus, 32 medical universities were selected based on a list prepared by the Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education (MHME), and the co-authored articles of these universities were extracted from Web of Science (WoS) database for the period 1990 to 2011. Findings show that top and first-rank universities in Iran such as Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, and Shiraz University of Medical Sciences tend to collaborate more with universities like themselves. This confirms the Matthew effect in scholarly collaborations of top and first-rank universities. Besides, the proximity rule has an important role in the formation of scholarly collaboration in surveyed universities. Some suggestions made to improve this kind of organizational collaboration in Iranian universities.