Career Publication Patterns and Collaborative “Styles” in American Academic Science

Collaboration between scholars first developed in Napoleonic France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries among the professionalizing scientists [7, 8], but it has only been since the Second World War that collaboration in published scholarship has exploded exponentially, until it now represents the majority of work in many fields [9, 46]. The greatest degree of collaboration tends to occur in those fields that are more heavily financially supported, that require sophisticated instrumentation and facilities [26], and that are the more mature disciplines with strong paradigm development. Research and scholarship in biomedical fields are highly collaborative, as are the hard sciences, except mathematics. The soft (social) sciences, applied research, and particularly the humanities, generally have markedly lower rates of collaborative scholarship [42, 59]. There is some evidence that collaborative scholarship results in an improved product: the more prestigious journals in a field contain a greater proportion of collaborative papers than do other publication outlets [9]; and there is a positive correlation between the number of authors of a paper and the probability of acceptance for publication [25, 45], although this relationship is attenuated when other paper character-