More than one million Russian publications indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database have been analyzed. The study covers the period from 2008 through 2023. The characteristics of author teams are examined through the distribution of publications by the number of authors, as well as the average, median, and maximum number of authors per publication. The analysis was carried out for three major fields of knowledge: Hard Science (HS); Social Sciences (SS); and Humanities and Arts (HA). It is shown that, other factors being equal, publications in the HS field are characterized by the largest author teams. For journal articles, the average number of authors was 18.6 for HS, 6.4 for SS, and 2 for HA. When considering the dependence of author team size on the publication type, the average number of authors in the HS field follows this order: journal papers, 18.6; conference proceedings, 6.6; and books or book chapters, 6.2. In almost all cases, a substantial increase in the size of author teams over time has been observed. For journal papers in the HS field, the average number of authors per publication increased 2.1 times over 16 years (from 9.1 to 19.0); for SS, it tripled (from 2.8 to 8.5); and for HA, it grew 1.5 times (from 1.5 to 2.2).
Gilyarevskii et al. (Sun,) studied this question.