Abstract
The number of co-authors has in the social sciences has been rising over the last decades, but a deeper understanding of why this rise is occurring is lacking. Previous studies of co-authorship in the social sciences often refer to the physical or life sciences or anecdotal evidence to explain these changes. This article examines the relationship between changes in co-authorship and research in Danish Economics and Political Science to gain greater insights into whether there are changes in the research or in researchers’ behavior. The analysis shows that articles with empirical research, quantitative research and/or survey are more likely to have a higher number of coauthors than articles based on theoretical, interview, and qualitative research. Furthermore, international and interinstitutional Danish articles tend to have more coauthors than interinstitutional articles. The analysis also reveals that the average number of authors increases for articles with all types of research and research approaches. This indicates that the collaboration behavior of the researchers is changing.
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Notes
The NJS are calculated in the WoS database maintain by CWTS, Leiden University.
Political Science is fairly broadly defined for the purposes of this study and includes the subject areas Public Administration and International Relations.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank; Carter Bloch for his many comments during the research process that substantially improved the article; Annette Bruun Andersen for language revision; Jesper Schneider for data extraction; Qi Wang for her help calculating the interdisciplinary variable; Emil Bargmann Madsen for checking some of my coding; Fereshteh Didegah for her comments and being an awesome officemate. In addition to Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein and the rest of the amazing Montreal group for giving me a great environment and comments during the data collection and coding. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the great comments from the referees that help to improve the article.
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Henriksen, D. What factors are associated with increasing co-authorship in the social sciences? A case study of Danish Economics and Political Science. Scientometrics 114, 1395–1421 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2635-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2635-0