3.31 Graphing the relation between international researchers and the impact of research: Does research from international teams make a bigger splash? Researchers explored whether research conducted by multinational research teams had a bigger impact than research from teams with less international representation (Hsiehchen et al., 2015). The graph here shows the relation between two measures: (1) the average number of authors of articles in each journal who are from a different country than the first author, and (2) a measure that assesses the scientific impact of the journal with a higher score, indicating more influential research.

a. In this study, are the independent and dependent variables nominal, ordinal, or scale?

b. What type of graph is this? Why did the researchers choose this type of graph?

c. In your own words, explain what the researchers found.