  Science has become more collaborative over the past years, a phenomenon that
is related to the increase in the number of authors per paper and the emergence
of interdisciplinary works featuring specialists of different fields. In such a
environment, it is not trivial to quantify the individual impact of
researchers. Here we analyze how the most prolific collaboration tie (in terms
of co-produced works) of an established researcher influences their
productivity and visibility metrics. In particular, we check how the number of
produced works, citations and h-index rank of an researcher changes when their
works also coauthored by their prolific collaborators are not considered. We
observed different patterns of prolific collaborator influence across the major
fields of knowledge. More specifically, in formal and applied sciences, the
prolific collaborators seem to play an important role to the visibility metrics
of authors even when they are among the highly cited. Such a results can help
stakeholders to better understand the collaboration patterns and draw measures
of success that also consider collaboration ties.
