Author Productivity and Collaboration: An Investigation of the Relationship Using the Literature of Technology

Previous studies of author productivity and collaboration have established that productive, active and prolific authors, especially in the field of science, are also highly collaborative. The purpose of this study is to determine whether the most productive authors in the literature of technology, for the three-year period 1993–1995, are also the most collaborative. The study used the weighted-average method to determine the extent of author collaboration and the Spearman rank correlation coefficient was employed to determine the correlation between productivity and collaboration. The study however, found that while the degree of collaboration in the literature of technology was very low, the productive authors correlated positively with the collaborative authors in the field.