Collaborative Research in Sociology: Trends and Contributing Factors

Abstract

To what extent do sociologists collaborate? Has this changed over time? What factors contribute to research collaboration among sociologists? To answer these questions, we examine trends in collaboration over a 70 year period and empirically test a variety of explanations for the increase in collaboration that we find. We analyze data collected from a stratified random sample of articles in two leading sociology journals between 1935 and 2005 (n=1274). Most of our analyses are descriptive and display trends over time. However, we pool the data across all years and estimate logistic regression models to assess the relative contribution of various factors. We find that the importance of geographical location has been waning since the 1950s, although the growth in cross-place collaborations stagnated between 1980 and 2005. We find that quantitative research is more likely to be collaborative, as are projects requiring data collection, though this may change because the collaboration rate among secondary data users is increasing at a faster rate. We find no significant gender differences in rates of collaboration, although male sole-authorship remains the most common form of publication. We also find the institutional prestige of coauthors is typically higher than that of sole-authors. Our results elucidate the extent of collaboration in sociology and reveal how several factors have contributed to this major shift in work organization.

Opening science: towards an agenda of open science in academia and industry

“…As scientific problems are getting more specialized and complex at the same time, it is not surprising that collaboration in science and research expanded in various disciplines within the last decades. For example in sociology, the percentage of co-authored articles almost quintupled in the last 70 years (Hunter and Leahey 2008). Comparable trends were observed in political science (Fisher et al 1998), physics (Braun et al 1992), and economics (Maske et al 2003).…”

Gender Inequity during the Ph.D.: Females in the Life Sciences Benefit Less from Their Integration into the Scientific Community

“…For instance, empirical studies suggest smaller gender differences in the social sciences (Hunter and Leahey 2008;Sugimoto et al 2013). However, while Hunter and Leahey (2008) did not find gender differences in the collaboration frequency in a sample of researchers in sociology, they did not include the quality and benefit from collaborations of each gender in their study. As stated above, the career status may be of further importance when analyzing gender differences in integration/collaboration and interpreting empirical results.…”

The Methodological Divide of Sociology - Evidence From Two Decades of Journal Publications

“…These research institutes are endowed with huge grants, a large body of researchers and the availability of large datasets collected over many years. This makes the division of labor both necessary and more likely, and increases the publication output over time (Abramo et al 2009;Hunter and Leahey 2008). For these reasons, we expect that the academic prestige economy leads to an increasing trend for publications applying quantitative methods (RQ2b).…”