Regular articleThe role of guarantor in scientific collaboration: The neighbourhood matters

•Guarantors are acknowledged for their prominent role by collaborating institutions.•Guarantorship is an asymmetric relationship and guarantors should get more credit.•Important institutions tend to grant prestigious institutions their recognition.•Acknowledgment as Guarantor anticipates acknowledgment of citation.

Output resulting from institutional collaboration has been widely used to create performance indicators, but focusing on research guarantors has recently provided a way to recognize the salient role of certain scientific actors. This paper elaborates on this approach to characterize the performance of an institution as guarantor based not only on its guarantor output but also on the importance of the institutions with which it collaborates. Accepting that guarantorship implies in some way acknowledgement of a prominent role on the part of the collaborating institutions, and that this recognition will be more important the more important the collaborating institutions, the paper describes two approaches to measuring this acknowledgement and discusses their effectiveness in helping to recognize prominent scientific actors by using a case study in the Library and Information Science field. The results show a high assortativity in scientific collaboration relationships, confirming the original hypothesis that important institutions tend to grant prestigious institutions the recognition of their relevance.