Dansk Center for Forskningsanalyse

This paper examines the rise in co-authorship in the Social Sciences over a 33-year period. We investigate the development in co-authorship in different research areas and discuss how the methodological differences in these research areas and changes in academia affect the tendency to co-author articles. The study is based on bibliographic data about 4.5 million peer review articles published in the period 1980- 2013 and indexed in the 56 subject categories of the Web of Science’s (WoS) Social Science Citation Index
(SSCI). Results show that in the majority of the subject categories we can document a rise in the mean number of authors and that there are disciplinary differences in how much the number of authors has increased. The most substantial rise in the mean and median number of authors has happen in subject categories, where the research often is based on the use of experiments, large data set, statistical methods and/or team-production models.