Independent scholars in a collaborative wave: visual modelling of a systematic critique of the sharp decline in the number of single authors in management SCI journals

The decline of single authorship in high-impact journals in the current collaboration-oriented knowledge production mechanism has triggered a deeper reflection on the change of power structure in academic ecology. The purpose of this paper is to explore the hidden institutional logic and evaluation system behind the marginalisation of single-author research in the field of management, and to reveal how the discourse of "collaborative advantage" conceals the structural process of power redistribution and ideological alienation. By analysing the data on the proportion of single authors in SCI journals, deconstructing the constructive text of institutional incentives, and combing the empirical relationship between knowledge-producing subjects in authorship, the study, together with the literature of Harzing, Wuchty, and Larivière, constructs a set of "collaborative incentives-responsibility dilution-originality weakening". A three-dimensional causal chain model of "collaboration incentives - responsibility dilution - originality weakening" is constructed. The results show that single authors are not explicitly excluded, but rather are gradually withdrawn from the core publishing orbit driven by funding policies, evaluation mechanisms, and reviewing preferences, and that independent thinking is structurally marginalised in institutionalised collaboration. The article calls for a paradigm shift from instrumental rationality to value rationality, and for the re-establishment of the legitimacy and public value of independent research at the level of evaluation mechanisms, journal systems and researcher ethics, in order to restore academic diversity and intellectual sovereignty.