Measuring the Trends of Authorship Patterns in PhD Theses of Political Science: A Citation Analysis

This paper discusses a bibliometric study of the data collected from 68 Doctoral Dissertations in Political Science presented at the University of Burdwan from 1996 to 2025. This study examines authorship over time within defined categories like single-authored papers, multi-authored papers, average density of authors, and the Degree of Collaboration (DC). Based on empirical results, single-authored articles are still the dominant format in political science literature. Only 4.32% of citations are in multi-authored works, and 95.68% of citations are single-authored. It reveals that the degree of collaboration of the subjects under study has increased from the period 1996-2005 to 2016-2025 except for ‘Political Thought '. The overall degree of collaboration (DC = 0.04) is low, with a mean number of authors for a citation of 1.05 over the 30 years. It also shows that Research collaboration is steadily improving over time. The study finds that the discipline is still dominated by single-scholarship, but an incremental trend towards a team-based approach to research is developing.