Rising Coauthorship in Sociology, 1895 to 2022

Abstract

More than 180,000 articles published in 110 sociology journals over 130 years reveal that coauthoring is increasingly a disciplinary norm in sociological publications. More than 55 percent of all articles published in 2022 were coauthored, and only five journals had lower average coauthoring in the past five years than their overall average. The sample includes both U.S. and non-U.S. journals, as well as specialist and generalist journals. The U.S. journals include those published by the American Sociological Association as well as various regional and specialty journals. When disaggregating the articles by these subcategories, the trend toward increased coauthoring remains.

Quality Control for Quality Computational Concepts: Wrangling with Theory and Data Wrangling as Theorizing

“…While assembling introduces new methodological difficulties, from issues involving matching records, disambiguating entities, to time-consuming manual data collection, it is often necessary if one seeks to develop abstractions sufficiently specific enough to be falsifiable and useful to think with. For example, to analyze over a century of co-authorship patterns in sociology, Stoltz (2023) uses a combination of hand collected and electronically curated journals to assemble a corpus that captures the intellectual diversity in the field. Stoltz's approach ensures his data sufficiently reflect an abstraction of sociological research inclusive of subfields and journals outside of the United States, aspects an "off-theshelf" bibliometric database would miss.…”