January 29, 2008
Why Are So Many Papers Co-Authored?
Why do so many academic papers have multiple authors? asks a reader of Marginal Revolution.
“Is it like cops in New York City—they’ve got everyone persuaded it’s too dangerous to go alone?” the reader asks. “Is there some networking benefit, professional or psychological? Does it just enable everyone to claim more publications? Has anyone studied which fields have the highest and lowest average number of authors per paper?”
Tyler Cowen and commenters have some good, plausible answers, yet somehow the cop metaphor resonates, no? As they used to say on Hill Street Blues, let’s be careful out there…
Alex Kafka | Posted on Tuesday January 29, 2008 | PermalinkComments
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IMHO, the major reason is because the mentor takes partial credit for the work of the mentee.
— BB Jan 29, 03:30 PM #
Just a few months ago, an important study of co-authorship was published in SCIENCE magazine by three Northwestern professors, Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin F. Jones, and Brian Uzzi. See http://keithsawyer.wordpress.com/2007/10/15/the-lone-genius-loses-to-the-team/
— Keith Sawyer Jan 29, 04:00 PM #
The absolute number of coauthored papers has grown too fast for that to be the whole explanation, although I do think the share of junior-senior pairings is larger than in the past. There is a common factor at work: there is now zero (truly, zero) discount for co-authorship with a peer and nearly zero for co-authorship with a more senior scholar. I’m dubious about all the “comparative advantage” stories on Tyler’s blog, though. At least for papers outside the very top journals, it’s more like, in the time we each write one we can both get credit for two. Sure there is a little “if my name’s on it I’ll read it and edit it” but the idea that all authors are contributing insight, much less text, on all of these papers doesn’t agree with my casual observation.
— Sam Jan 29, 04:03 PM #
Sometimes this is a way for a mentor to encourage a mentee. Many first time authors are dubious about the process. Once they experience it with a mentor, they are more confident about their abililty to publish in the future.
— Glenda Thornton Jan 29, 04:10 PM #
Co-authorship is also reflective of changes in the conduct of science. In fact, the NIH Roadmap calls for more “team-based” science. The stereotype of the dedicated scientist working in isolation late into the night is no longer typical or reasonable.
— Kevin Grigsby Jan 29, 04:18 PM #
The answer is a no brainer – if you need to publish a bunch to get tenure or to get promoted you need to have multiple projects with multiple people going at once.It is less individually time consuming to be a co-suthor than a single author for the same paper. Thus you can have more things going on at the same time, hopefully have more things puslished (since you have more things out there), and hopefully increase the odds of making tenure/promotion.
— annon Jan 29, 04:29 PM #
My favorite multiple-authored papers are those generated by medical schools where it is almost guaranteed 100% that the number of authors will outnumber the size of the sample being discussed.
TH
— Taylor Harris Jan 29, 04:31 PM #
The biggest danger with multiple-authored papers is that in the rat-race to get out as many publications as possible you will end up with your name dragged in the dirt in a scientific fraud scandal. Academics with 10 post-docs and 20 PhD students beavering away in their labs and getting their name on everything that comes out of the lab are just asking for it. It also goes a long way to explain why so much research these days shows little evidence of originality. I am very careful about putting my name on anything and I prefer to write papers with me, myself and I. By far the best co-authors I know of. It is getting to the stage where people who write single-authored papers are considered “a bit odd”. However, at least I was the one that thought up what I did, I actually did it and I put my name on it!
— Raymond J. RITCHIE Jan 29, 06:48 PM #
Several major reasons, all documented decades ago, in research:
1) citation greed—tenure programs incent faculty to chop topics into tiny pieces to up publishing numbers, incent faculty to steal ideas from their own students, incent faculty to name as co-authors every possible person they might want to have a tenured academic future;
2) hard science research question cost—more and more of the really hard questions in science involve equipment requiring dozens when not hundreds to build and run it, leading to committees designing the research done on it;
(note: we have learned that the REALLY hard questions like—explain gravity—are at present impossible so instead of explaining gravity we explain models of how it affects things, this is the first disillusionment point in MIT freshmen year physics lectures, the old guys up front gave up on explanation decades ago);
3) lust for cooperation—the US academia domain has created nasty people who do not “spill” ideas to others in lunch and hallway conversation for fear of having someone else’s grad students publish it—so everyone suffers from the un-intellectual atmosphere of social life in tier one institutions today—making for a drive to appear to oneself and others as “social”, hence, nominal cooperation expressed as co-authorship, among people temporarily not eating each other cannibalistically;
4) division of labor—if I co-author, the guidelines from Gerontology journal, for example, allow four different contribution types, one of which is mere theory provision, an excellent hiding place for time-pressed senior faculty—you provide a couple of faming concepts then set the little people to work on data collecting and analysis = more papers per unit effort and unit time in one’s career;
5) excusatory theories of the group locus of ideation and invention—creativity research pressed by technology funders/firms has drifted into “discovering” that all novel ideas are really group creations not heroic individual creations, so there is a ready ideology that can blindly justify putting the name of one’s cat, one’s cleaning vendor, one’s worst nearby student onto every paper, because research shows that new ideas are social in locus-of-creation;
6) pressure from bad-minded funding providers—the NIH, NSA, and other N’s—mandate “team-based research” these days, being, as they are, convinced that legal liability is reduced by less dependence on single persons—soon we will get the national TV network level of research quality we so richly deserve, thanks to such people.
— Richard Tabor Greene Jan 29, 08:30 PM #