On the extinction of the single‐authored paper: The causes and consequences of increasingly collaborative applied ecological research

Abstract

In 1963, Price analysed authorship patterns in chemical science and identified that "...the proportion of multi-author papers has accelerated steadily and powerfully, and it is now so large that if it continues at the present rate, by 1980 the single-author paper will be extinct" (Price, 1963).An analysis of all research papers published in Journal of Applied Ecology since 1966 shows that the trends identified by Price also apply to our field: an exponential increase in the mean number of authors per published article has been mirrored by a sharp decline in the proportion of single-authored papers (Figure 1).From over 60% of all publications in the 1960s, single-author papers now make up less than 4% (averaged over the past 10 years).Although the single-author paper has hung on well beyond 1980 in Journal of Applied Ecology, their extinction now appears imminent.The widespread trend towards multi-authored papers identified by Price has since been observed across all sciences (Adams, 2012), and is widely believed to reflect a growth in collaboration (Glänzel & Schubert, 2004).Intriguingly, an analysis of manuscript submission and citation data from Journal of Applied Ecology highlights some of the potential benefits for larger author teams.Over the last 10 years, submissions with four or more authors were almost 2.5 times more likely to be accepted than singleauthored manuscripts (Figure 2), and had significantly higher citation rates when published (Figure 3), reflecting citation trends observed across 32 ecology journals (Fox, Paine, & Sauterey, 2016).Although higher acceptance and citation rates could suggest that the growth in author numbers is resulting in higher quality science that has greater impact, the drivers of these changes and their implications for applied ecological research remain unclear.In this editorial, we consider some of the underlying causes and consequences of longer author lists for applied ecological research.

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