What does a typical UCSF publication look like, in terms of internal vs. external co-authors? Here’s a breakdown of each type of co-author, among dentistry-related publications by UCSF researchers published in 2013.

Three immediate take-aways:

• I was surprised to see so many co-authorships between a single UCSF researcher and one or more external researchers — the very top row of results. By volume, this accounts for 52% of the papers we looked at.
• When every author is internal to UCSF, there’s an average of 3.5 UCSF co-authors
• When there’s an external collaboration, there’s an average of 2.0 UCSF co-authors

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Method: I searched Web of Science for dentistry-related articles published between January 1-December 5, 2013. I began by running a search for any articles published in 2013 matching a number of dentistry-related keywords (dental, dentistry, electrogalvanism, endodontics, jaw relation record, mouth rehabilitation, odontometry, oral, orthodontics, periodontics, prosthodontics, teeth, tooth), then filtered only those that matched the “DENTISTRY ORAL SURGERY MEDICINE” Web of Science category. Web of Science automatically attempts to normalize institution names; in addition, I lumped all institution labels with names that start with “UCSF”, “UC San Francisco”, or “UCSF Sch ” to “Univ Calif San Francisco” as part of the main UCSF grouping.