Are international co-publications an indicator for quality of scientific research?

This article deals with the role of internationally co-authored papers (co-publications). Specifically, we compare, within a data-set of German research units, citation and co-publication indicators as a proxy for the unobserved quality dimension of scientific research. In that course we will also deal with the question whether both citations and co-publications are considerably related. Our results suggest that, although there is a strong partial correlation between citations and co-publications within a multivariate setting, we cannot use reasonably normalised co-publication indicators as an alternative proxy for quality. Thus, concerning quality assessment, there remains a primer on citation analysis.