The Size of Author Teams in the Social Sciences

The last decades have seen an unprecedented rise in the size of author teams across all academic disciplines. In the social sciences, existing literature highlights that the number of authors varies greatly between research fields, geographical regions, job positions and experience. Yet we lack comprehensive understandings of the specific effects of these factors. By employing data from a large-scaled worldwide survey, we shed light on this conundrum. Our results show that psychologists as well as information technologists and operations researchers work on average in larger author teams while sociologists and political scientists work in smaller author teams. In addition, we find that Eastern European scholars work in smaller author teams and that postdocs tend to have more single-authored publications. Based on our results we call upon those in charge of search and tenure procedures to focus more on multi-authored publications while keeping the applicants’ different research field and geographical backgrounds in mind. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of academic conferences as they allow scholars to establish fruitful networks for future collaborations.