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Co-authorship rates by discipline?

Brian Leiter

Jason Clark, a postdoc at the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrueck, writes:

It seems clear that philosophers co-author papers far less often than scientists do, but while there has been some discussion on your blog as to the market value of co-authored works, I haven't found any mention of comparative data on co-authorship rates by discipline (not to mention the potential significance of such differences).  Do you know of any such research, or could you post this question for comments?

Thoughts/information from readers?

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9 responses to “Co-authorship rates by discipline?”

  1. K. Brad Wray

    There is a lot of research on this topic. I report on a bit of it in my paper "The Epistemic Significance of Collaborative Research," in *Philosophy of Science* (2002). I am also working on something new on the topic, but concerned with collaboration in the social sciences.
    Most of the research on the topic is by sociologists and people working in the field of scientometrics. You merely need to type "collaborative research" into Google Scholar and you will find a lot of sources.
    Paul Thagard's book, *How Scientists Explain Disease*, is also worth looking at.

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  2. Aaron Lercher

    The NSF Science and Engineering Indicators compiles annual data for scientific disciplines and engineering:
    http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c5/c5s4.htm
    Go to "Coauthorship and Collaboration," then Figure 5-24, then click for underlying data.

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  3. Ben Saunders

    Helen Sword's book, Stylish Academic Writing, includes a survey of recent writing in ten different fields (summarised on p. 26). She found the average philosophy article in her study to have 1.1 authors, compared to 1 for literary studies, 2.8 for psychology, and 9.6 for medicine.

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  4. Chris Bertram

    A lot of papers in the sciences are co-authored mainly in the sense that everyone on the research team gets their name on the paper. This can get quite absurd: having collaborated on an education project with some scientists I now have my name on a paper that I not only did not write but had never even read at the time of publication! So comparisons between disciplines of genuine co-authorship are going to be tricky.

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  5. VL

    In the biomedical sciences, authors listed in the middle are typically there for some technical contribution (perhaps a lab technician's Western blot is in one of the figures); more senior scientists are sometimes named as co-authors merely because they "donated" a reagent (say, a line of mutant mice or flies) to the group that did the research described in the paper, on the condition that they would be listed among the authors. In other words, named authorship is sometimes treated as a courtesy, sometimes as an obligation; it is often subject to negotiation.

    Mainly, this situation arises because modern biomedical science is as material as it is conceptual; differences in co-authorship rates, as well as the order in which authors are listed, reflect not only cultural differences among fields but very practical differences in the product of the work and how it is achieved. It's hard to think of a situation analogous to the reagent-donating author arising in the humanities. Perhaps in the digital humanities authorship credit will be granted to programmers who design programs to analyze whatever data the 'humanist' wants to examine.

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  6. RC

    VL is right about the biomedical sciences. In addition to any conceptual contributions, there are lots of material contributions that one can make and end up as a listed author because of this contribution. This is very true in clinical medical research where material contribution can come in the form of patients that one enrolls in a trial. Because the everyday notion of the author is associated with the presentation of one's own intellectual content in written form, and because one can become an author without having written anything or contributed any intellectual content, some have pushed for a replacement of the idea of the author with the dual ideas of the contributor and the guarantor (in the biomedical sciences, see Drummond Rennie and Richard Smith on this score). This is an attempt to separate out and make explicit the different contributions people have made to a paper (only some of whom will be listed as authors at the top of the page) and to identify a subset of the authors (the guarantors) who can vouch for the contributions from the other contributors.

    To get back to the original question, I think that any attempt to do a cross-discipline comparison of co-authorship rates will quickly run into large and robust sociological differences in how papers are produced and in how those who contributed to the production of a paper are publicly recognized: e.g., as a listed co-author, as a name in the acknowledgement section, as a name in a footnote, and so on. If one takes the notion of "author" to be identical across disciplines, and simply counts the names at the top of the page in, say, philosophy papers vs. particle physics papers, then one will see vast numerical differences; but the more interesting difference, I think, comes from the sociology behind those numbers. To exaggerate only a little, one person working alone can produce an original and enduring philosophy paper; a particle physicist working alone cannot produce any paper (or, at least, not one that presents original empirical support for its ideas). Or to put it differently: using the humanities model of authorship would (possibly drastically) reduce the number of authors on many scientific papers, while using the scientific model of authorship would increase the number of authors on many philosophy papers.

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  7. Don Fallis

    As Brad Wray mentions, Paul Thagard has written extensively on the topic of collaboration. A few years ago, I commented on a paper by Thagard in which he directly addressed the question of why there is so much collaboration in science and so little collaboration in philosophy. My commentary is available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1509182

    From the Abstract …
    "In this paper, I offer an alternative to Thagard's explanation of the lack of collaboration in philosophy. He appeals to its lack of a tradition of collaboration and to the a priori nature of much philosophical research. I claim that philosophers rarely collaborate simply because they can usually get the benefits of collaborating without paying the costs of actually doing so."

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  8. Benj Hellie

    RC's vision of the scientific model of authorship in philosophy was anticipated some years ago in the following passage:

    "How can I be absolutely sure that John R. Searle himself … is in fact the author? Perhaps it is … even D. Searle, to whom John R. Searle acknowledges his indebtedness: "I am indebted to H. Dreyfus and D. Searle for discussion of these matters." This is the first note of the Reply. …

    "If John R. Searle owes a debt to D. Searle concerning this discussion, then the "true" copyright ought to belong … to a Searle who is divided, multiplied, conjugated, shared. What a complicated signature! And one that becomes even more complex when the debt includes my old friend, H. Dreyfus, with whom I myself have worked, discussed, exchanged ideas, so that if it is indeed through him that the Searles can have "read" me, "understood" me, and "replied" to me, then I, too, can claim a stake in the "action" or "obligation," the stocks and bonds, of this holding company, the Copyright Trust. And it is true that I have occasionally had the feeling … of having almost "/dictated/" this reply. "I" therefore feel obligated to claim my share of the copyright of the /Reply/" (Jacques Derrida, 'Limited Inc a b c …').

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  9. Jason Clark

    Thanks to all who have replied, and for the wealth of data. I agree with most of what has been said concerning the differences in the nature of co-authorship across disciplines, although I have witnessed that some of these dynamics also apply to philosophical publications (e.g., senior people often more or less entirely turn over invited articles, etc. to graduate students, but retain (first) authorship).

    I also question to some degree the strength of the idea that empirical papers require specialists in more disparate disciplines. For one thing, philosophy has numerous sub-areas of expertise, collaboration among which could easily produce results superior to those of either area by itself. Second, philosophy obviously has strongh ties to disciplines from physics to poetry, yet collaboration across these lines is lower than that which occurs across subfields of scientific disciplines.

    There also seems to be an independent cultural element to these differences. I spend an equal amount of time working with scientists and philosophers. Conversations on topics of mutual interest in scientific circles easily turn to the possibility of co-authoring papers on the topic (even when these do not require specialized scientific knowledge), while philosophers tend to comment on one anothers' work, usually without considering the full shift to co-authorship.

    Many thanks,
    Jason

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