NWB2023_A cross national comparison of evolution of co-authorship practices in Social Sciences and Humanities

Co-authorship in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) is much less common then in other fields of science. Rapid increases in the number of co-authors and phenomena such as hyper-authorship are rare in the SSH. In a publish or perish culture, however, increasing co-authorship might be adopted as a strategy to strengthen one’s portfolio. Evolving research methodologies and orientations and interdisciplinary collaboration may moreover induce more co-authorship over time (see e.g., Arhiliuc and Guns, 2023). So far, however, no cross-national analysis of SSH co-authorship trends based on comprehensive publication data has been conducted.

With this study, we intend to fill this gap and analyze the results in terms of research orientation and possible contextual influences of performance-based funding systems. Data for this study originate from the Flemish VABB (publication data for the period 2000-2021, i.e., 22 years), and the Polish PBN (publication data for the period 2013-2021, i.e., 9 years). We will invite other colleagues to join this study with comprehensive publication data from other countries, e.g., for the Czech Republic, Finland, Norway, and Slovenia relevant data are probably available. During NBW2023 Gothenburg we will present preliminary results of this cross-national comparison of SSH co-authorship trends of journal articles.

Reference
Arhiliuc, C., Guns, R. (2023). Disciplinary collaboration rates in the social sciences and humanities: what is the influence of classification type? Scientometrics 128, 3419–3436. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04719-0