The rise in co-authorship in the social sciences (1980–2013)

Dorte Henriksen ()
Additional contact information
Dorte Henriksen: Aarhus University

Scientometrics, 2016, vol. 107, issue 2, No 8, 455-476

Abstract: Abstract This article examines the rise in co-authorship in the Social Sciences over a 34-year period. It investigates the development in co-authorship in different research fields and discusses how the methodological differences in these research fields together with changes in academia affect the tendency to co-author articles. The study is based on bibliographic data about 4.5 million peer review articles published in the period 1980–2013 and indexed in the 56 subject categories of the Web of Science’s Social Science Citation Index. The results show a rise in the average number of authors, share of co-authored and international co-authored articles in the majority of the subject categories. However, the results also show that there are great disciplinary differences to the extent of the rises in co-authorship. The subject categories with a great share of international co-authored articles have generally experienced an increase in co-authorship, but increasing international collaboration is not the only factor influencing the rise in co-authorship. Hence, the most substantial rises have occurred in subject categories, where the research often is based on the use of experiments, large data set, statistical methods and/or team-production models.

Keywords: Co-authorship; Social sciences; Research collaboration; Bibliometrics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (51)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-016-1849-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:107:y:2016:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-016-1849-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-016-1849-x

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().