No citation advantage for monograph-based collaborations?

•Collaboratively produced monographs have similar levels of citation impact to that of solo monographs in 30 different subject areas.•Articles have a citation advantage for collaboration in subject areas in which monographs do not.•Policy makers should not encourage collaboration in book-based disciplines.

It is widely believed that collaboration is advantageous in science, for example, with collaboratively written articles tending to attract more citations than solo articles and strong arguments for the value of interdisciplinary collaboration. Nevertheless, it is not known whether the same is true for research that produces books. This article tests whether co-authored scholarly monographs attract more citations than solo monographs using books published before 2011 from 30 categories in the Web of Science. The results show that solo monographs numerically dominate collaborative monographs, but give no evidence of a citation advantage for collaboration on monographs. In contrast, for nearly all these subjects (28 out of 30) there was a citation advantage for collaboratively produced journal articles. As a result, research managers and funders should not incentivise collaborative research in book-based subjects or in research that aims to produce monographs, but should allow the researchers themselves to freely decide whether to collaborate or not.