Co-authorship patterns across countries and time

Shows you how to use the Publish or Perish software to study co-authorship patterns across countries

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Sat 19 Oct 2024 11:02)

The free Publish or Perish software can be used to test specific hypotheses about for instance co-authorship patterns. If I wanted to test the hypothesis that on average North Americans tend to publish more co-authored papers than Europeans, I could use PoP to conduct a large-scale comparison of North American versus European academic authors.

However, that would be quite time-consuming. I can also investigate this on a journal level; it has been well established that North American journals have a larger proportion of North American authors, whilst European journals feature more European authors. This is true in any discipline, but it is even more prominent in the Social Sciences and Humanities where research topics tend to be more “location-bound” than in the Sciences.

Taking Accounting journals as an example, of the six top Accounting journals, four are North America (JAR, AR, CAR, and RAS). The remaining two journals Accounting, Organisations and Society and European Accounting Review are European. The table below shows the PoP authorship per paper metrics for Web of Science data exported to Excel. I used the Web of Science as – because of truncation – Google Scholar authorship data are not entirely accurate. Looking at the 2006-2011 year period, I found that co-authorship patterns do indeed differ between the four North American (2.15-2.45 authors per paper) and the two European journals (1.93-2.06 authors per paper).

As can be seen in the lead image which repeats this analysis for 2018-2022, these differences partly persist in recent years, although the average number of authors per paper has increased in all journals. Of course, this is only a very small sample of journals, but one could easily expand this to other journals in Accounting or the field of Business more generally.

Earlier projects in this series

Publish or Perish is a Swiss army knife!

These are just a few of the hundreds of nuggets of quality information that you can find using the free Publish or Perish software. Are you interested in finding out more about how you can use the software to conduct effective author, journal, topic, and affiliation searches?

Do you want to learn how to use it for tenure or promotion applications, conducting literature reviews and meta-analyses, deciding where to submit your paper, preparing for job interviews, writing laudations or obituaries, finding reviewers or keynote speakers, uncovering “citation connections” between scholars, and doing bibliometric research?

To read about all of this and much much more, buy my brand-new guide in my Crafting your career in academia series: Using the Publish or Perish software. At 375 pages it is chock-full of tips and tricks on how to get the most out of the software. I promise you will discover at least a dozen use cases that you had never even thought about before!

Other books in the series

My book series Crafting your career in academia launched in August 2022 with a book on Writing Effective Promotion Applications. The series is a collection of short guides dealing with various aspects of working in academia. It is based on my popular blog.

Aug 2022:

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Copyright © 2024 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Sat 19 Oct 2024 11:02

Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.

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