Co-authorship patterns across disciplines over time

Shows you how to use the Publish or Perish software to study co-authorship patterns across various disciplines and make your case for disciplinary impact

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Sat 19 Oct 2024 13:43)

Last month we looked at using the free Publish or Perish software can be used to test specific hypotheses about co-authorship patterns across countries over time. This same strategy can be used to compare co-authorship patterns across disciplines and time. One could look at a few top journals in every discipline and calculate co-authorship patterns over the years. The table below shows a small-scale comparison of co-authorship patterns between 1995-2022 for two top journals in the Humanities, the Sciences/Medicine, and Management.

Data were collected from OpenAlex using an ISSN journal search and exported to Excel. Bibliometric research often requires significant manual checking and cleaning. In this case, I needed to remove all articles without authors, as well as all editorials and book reviews. The former obviously reduces the average number of authors. The latter two article types are normally written by sole authors and would lead us to underestimate the average number of authors for journals with a high number of publications in these categories.

A comparison of seven consecutive 4-year periods shows that in the Sciences/Medicine papers typically have a much larger number of authors than in both the Humanities and Management – as one of the Social Sciences. In the Humanities and the Social Sciences single-authored articles are common and co-authored articles typically only have 2 or 3 co-authors. In the Sciences/Medicine single-authored article are a rarity. Most articles have at least 6 to 10 authors.

These results can be useful if one wants to make a case for promotion to a panel that is comprised of academics from different disciplines. It helps to explain why it is not realistic to expect the same number of publications from academics in the Social Sciences and Humanities as from academics in the Sciences/Medicine.

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:

Only £5.95...		 Nov 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Feb 2023:

Only £5.95...		 May 2023:

Only £5.95...

Copyright © 2024 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Sat 19 Oct 2024 13:43

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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