Abstract International collaboration is sometimes encouraged in the belief that it generates higher quality research or is more capable of addressing societal problems. Nevertheless, while there is evidence that the journal articles of international teams tend to be more cited than average, perhaps from increased international audiences, there is no science‐wide direct academic evidence of a connection between international collaboration and research quality. This article empirically investigates the connection between international collaboration and research quality for the first time, with 148,977 UK‐based journal articles with post publication expert review scores from the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF). Using an ordinal regression model controlling for collaboration, international partners increased the odds of higher quality scores in 27 out of 34 Units of Assessment (UoAs) and all Main Panels. The results therefore give the first large scale evidence of the fields in which international co‐authorship for articles is usually apparently beneficial. At the country level, the results suggests that UK collaboration with other high research‐expenditure economies generates higher quality research, even when the countries produce lower citation impact journal articles than the United Kingdom. Worryingly, collaborations with lower research‐expenditure economies tend to be judged lower quality, possibly through misunderstanding Global South research goals.

Abstract Altmetrics are web‐based quantitative impact or attention indicators for academic articles that have been proposed to supplement citation counts. This article reports the first assessment of the extent to which mature altmetrics from Altmetric.com and Mendeley associate with individual article quality scores. It exploits expert norm‐referenced peer review scores from the UK Research Excellence Framework 2021 for 67,030+ journal articles in all fields 2014–2017/2018, split into 34 broadly field‐based Units of Assessment (UoAs). Altmetrics correlated more strongly with research quality than previously found, although less strongly than raw and field normalized Scopus citation counts. Surprisingly, field normalizing citation counts can reduce their strength as a quality indicator for articles in a single field. For most UoAs, Mendeley reader counts are the best altmetric (e.g., three Spearman correlations with quality scores above 0.5), tweet counts are also a moderate strength indicator in eight UoAs (Spearman correlations with quality scores above 0.3), ahead of news (eight correlations above 0.3, but generally weaker), blogs (five correlations above 0.3), and Facebook (three correlations above 0.3) citations, at least in the United Kingdom. In general, altmetrics are the strongest indicators of research quality in the health and physical sciences and weakest in the arts and humanities.

Abstract Collaboration is encouraged because it is believed to improve academic research, supported by indirect evidence in the form of more coauthored articles being more cited. Nevertheless, this might not reflect quality but increased self‐citations or the “audience effect”: citations from increased awareness through multiple author networks. We address this with the first science wide investigation into whether author numbers associate with journal article quality, using expert peer quality judgments for 122,331 articles from the 2014–20 UK national assessment. Spearman correlations between author numbers and quality scores show moderately strong positive associations (0.2–0.4) in the health, life, and physical sciences, but weak or no positive associations in engineering and social sciences, with weak negative/positive or no associations in various arts and humanities, and a possible negative association for decision sciences. This gives the first systematic evidence that greater numbers of authors associates with higher quality journal articles in the majority of academia outside the arts and humanities, at least for the UK. Positive associations between team size and citation counts in areas with little association between team size and quality also show that audience effects or other nonquality factors account for the higher citation rates of coauthored articles in some fields.

Abstract Citation counts are widely used as indicators of research quality to support or replace human peer review and for lists of top cited papers, researchers, and institutions. Nevertheless, the relationship between citations and research quality is poorly evidenced. We report the first large‐scale science‐wide academic evaluation of the relationship between research quality and citations (field normalized citation counts), correlating them for 87,739 journal articles in 34 field‐based UK Units of Assessment (UoA). The two correlate positively in all academic fields, from very weak (0.1) to strong (0.5), reflecting broadly linear relationships in all fields. We give the first evidence that the correlations are positive even across the arts and humanities. The patterns are similar for the field classification schemes of Scopus and Dimensions.ai, although varying for some individual subjects and therefore more uncertain for these. We also show for the first time that no field has a citation threshold beyond which all articles are excellent quality, so lists of top cited articles are not pure collections of excellence, and neither is any top citation percentile indicator. Thus, while appropriately field normalized citations associate positively with research quality in all fields, they never perfectly reflect it, even at high values.

Twitter is used by a substantial minority of the populations of many countries to share short messages, sometimes including images. Nevertheless, despite some research into specific images, such as selfies, and a few news stories about specific tweeted photographs, little is known about the types of images that are routinely shared. In response, this article reports a content analysis of random samples of 800 images tweeted from the UK or USA during a week at the end of 2014. Although most images were photographs, a substantial minority were hybrid or layered image forms: phone screenshots, collages, captioned pictures, and pictures of text messages. About half were primarily of one or more people, including 10% that were selfies, but a wide variety of other things were also pictured. Some of the images were for advertising or to share a joke but in most cases the purpose of the tweet seemed to be to share the minutiae of daily lives, performing the function of chat or gossip, sometimes in innovative ways.