Team Size Moderates the Citation Association of High-Output- Country Participation: A Large-Scale Informetric Analysis

Abstract Team size and country composition are central to interpreting differences in collaboration-related citations, yet their joint association remains poorly understood. This study examines whether team size moderates the citation association of high-output-country (HOC) participation while distinguishing country-output status from country and affiliation diversity. Resource complementarity and signal dilution offer competing expectations about how this association varies with team size. The analysis covers 60,403 co-authored articles with two to five authors, published in 49 Scopus-indexed Business, Management, and Accounting journals between January 1966 and April 2025. Negative binomial models account for citation overdispersion and include journal and five-year publication-block fixed effects, as well as article-level controls. Across binary and weighted HOC measures, the interaction between team size and HOC participation is negative and statistically significant. Model predictions indicate that the citation advantage associated with HOC participation in smaller teams declines and can reverse as team size increases. This pattern persists across specifications incorporating different diversity and institutional terms, although the interaction is not statistically significant for annualized citations. The study identifies team size as a boundary condition on the HOC–citation association and highlights the importance of distinguishing team scale, geographical diversity, and country-output status in bibliometric research evaluation.