Scientific collaboration is of significant importance in tackling grand challenges and breeding innovations. Despite the increasing interest in investigating and promoting scientific collaborations, we know little about the collaboration sustainability as well as mechanisms behind it. In this paper, we set out to study the relationships between early-stage reciprocity and collaboration sustainability. By proposing and defining h-index reciprocity, we give a comprehensive statistical analysis on how reciprocity influences scientific collaboration sustainability, and find that scholars are not altruism and the key to sustainable collaboration is fairness. The unfair h-index reciprocity has an obvious negative impact on collaboration sustainability. The bigger the reciprocity difference, the less sustainable in collaboration. This work facilitates understanding sustainable collaborations and thus will benefit both individual scholar in optimizing collaboration strategies and the whole academic society in improving teamwork efficiency.

科学协作对于应对重大挑战和培育创新至关重要。尽管人们对研究和促进科学合作越来越感兴趣，但我们对合作的可持续性及其背后的机制知之甚少。在本文中，我们着手研究早期互惠与协作可持续性之间的关系。通过提出和定义h指数互惠性，我们对互惠性如何影响科学合作的可持续性进行了全面的统计分析，发现学者不是利他主义，可持续合作的关键是公平。H指数互惠不公平会对协作的可持续性产生明显的负面影响。互惠差异越大，协作的可持续性就越差。