Collaboration in sociology and other scientific disciplines: A comparative trend analysis of scholarship in the social, physical, and mathematical sciences

Abstract

This inquiry examines comparative trends in collaboration among scholars, both over several decades and for several scientific disciplines. Findings suggest that in sociology specifically and science generally the trend is toward greater collaborative scholarship. At the turn of the twentieth century, better than 90 percent of the articles appearing in major periodicals in physics, biochemistry, biology, and chemistry were sole authored. Today, over 95 percent of such articles are collaboratively published. Disciplines affiliated with the social and mathematical sciences have experienced similar monotonic increases in collaborative activity, albeit, at a slower rate. A discussion of plausible explanations is offered for this observed growth in scientific collaboration.

A Typology of Virtual Research Environments

“…Second, disciplines differ in their emphasis on scholarly collaboration. Studies have found that 80-90% of articles in leading journals in biology, physics, and chemistry were collaborations, whereas this figure is around 50-60% for social science journals (political science, sociology, anthropology, and psychology) and 10% for humanities [20,21]. Disciplines also vary in the degree to which they collaborate remotely.…”

Network Analysis and Indicators

“…Chubin (1976) suggested that "the imagery of a network has captured the fancy of most specialty analysts" (p. 463). Studies on the social production of knowledge (Babchuk, Keith, & Peters, 1999;Crane, 1972;Friedkin, 1998;Kuhn, 1996) showed the relationship between the social position of scientists and their beliefs and ideas. It is only recently, with the advancement of computer power and digital data availability, that large-scale network studies of entire disciplines became possible.…”

Issues in the analysis of co-authorship networks

“…Hargens 1975;Yoshikane and Kegeura 2004). Even though collaboration displays a positive trend in almost all disciplines (see Hudson 1996;Babchuk et al 1999;Moody 2004), this tendency emerges to different degrees in each discipline on the basis of its internal organization. Indeed, researchers in natural sciences are more likely to work in large laboratory settings and this gives rise to team-based research outputs (Laband and Tollison 2000), while in social sciences this does not often happen.…”

“…In disciplines characterised by a less intensive use of quantitative methods, researchers tend to work more independently. Despite this attitude, in Social Sciences there is, nowadays, a growing tendency among researchers to work cooperatively (Babchuk et al 1999).…”