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.

In a real sense, there is no such thing as “my” ideas. Scholarship and notions of intellectual property are poor bedmates.

—James March (March and Coutu 2006)

The Social Production of Sociological Knowledge

Although many aspects of the social production of sociological knowledge are lost to the relentless decay of collective and individual memory, some are ossified in practices of citation, acknowledgment, and claims to authorship. Of course, no book, chapter, or article is written in isolation, but it is also true that individuals contribute more and less to the production of a specific text. Where we draw the lines between influence, assistance, and authorship is governed by disciplinary conventions, as is the value given to “solo-authored” publication in reputation, hiring, and promotion (Biagioli 2000; Leahey 2016). Collaborative research may spur innovation, increase productivity, enhance quality, and improve the impact of scholarship (Wuchty, Jones, and Uzzi 2007; Leahey 2016), as well as allow scholars to cope with the pressure to publish more (Schwemmer and Wieczorek 2020; Warren 2019). Nevertheless, the solo-authored piece remains esteemed—in Bakhtin’s (2013) words, “monologue pretends to be the ultimate word” (p. 293)—perhaps, in part, because of difficulties evaluating the individual contributions to coauthored work (Leahey 2016:87). These considerations both shape and are shaped by the extent coauthoring is abnormal for a given discipline. The following visualization of nearly 130 years of sociological research in 110 journals demonstrates that coauthorship is not only common but becoming the norm in sociology (see also Leahey 2016:87; Moody 2004; Moody, Edelmann, and Light 2022; Warren 2019).

Constructing the Corpus

This visualization was based on a corpus of more than 180,000 articles published in 110 sociology journals. My selection of journals, although attempting to be exhaustive, is a purposive sample (see Supplementary Material for sampling details). It includes both U.S. (n = 59) and non-U.S. (n = 51) journals, as well as specialist (n = 64) and generalist (n = 46) journals. The U.S. journals include both those published by the American Sociological Association (ASA) and various regional and specialty journals (e.g., the American Journal of Sociology, Sociological Forum, and Symbolic Interaction). In cases in which journals changed names over the years (e.g., Sociometry became Social Psychology and is now Social Psychology Quarterly), I pool articles using the most recent names. Once the sample of journals was constructed, I used Constellate and the Web of Science to collect all articles published in each respective journal. ¹ I then removed book reviews and corrections, resulting in 182,159 total articles. “Online first” publications, which may be published in 2023 issues, are categorized as 2022 publications. In the visualization, articles are categorized as either coauthored or not, and thus no consideration is given to the total count of authors. ²

Descriptive Results

Figure 1 (top panel) demonstrates that in the aggregate, coauthoring has steadily marched upward. In 1942, 9.2 percent of articles were coauthored, 31.2 percent in 1982, and 55.8 percent in 2022. When looking only at ASA journals (i.e., those broadly representative of the discipline in the United States ³ ), the trend is roughly similar, except that coauthoring is more common in earlier periods than in non-ASA journals (second panel, first facet). When comparing U.S. with non-U.S. journals (second panel, last facet), the former have more coauthoring than do latter for most years, but that gap is closing (Durkheim’s L’annee sociologique was largely a collaborative enterprise in the early nineteenth century).

Figure 1.

Percentage of coauthored articles published in 110 sociology journals for each year from 1895 to 2022. The solid black line indicates the 50 percent mark for all plots. The top panel shows the aggregate percentages across all journals. The three facets in the middle panel show rolling five-year average percentages disaggregated into (1) American Sociological Association (ASA) and non-ASA, (2) generalist and specialist, and (3) U.S.-based and non-U.S.-based journals. The bottom panel provides rolling five-year average percentages for a selection of 12 journals: the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, the Sociological Review, Socius, Sociological Science, Sociological Theory, Demography, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, the Journal of Mathematical Sociology, Cultural Sociology, and Poetics.

It is also likely that coauthoring varies by the type of journal. When disaggregating by generalist and specialist journals (second panel, middle facet), the trends remain the same. It may be the case, however, that pooling specialist journals is averaging out extremes. Indeed, specialty journals that tend to have lower coauthorship include theory (e.g., Sociological Theory and Theory, Culture & Society) and qualitative (e.g., the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography and Ethnography) journals, while those with higher coauthorship rates include criminology and demography journals (Criminology, the Journal of Marriage and Family, and Demography) and more quantitative (the Journal of Mathematical Sociology and Social Networks) journals.

Broadly, journals associated with qualitative subfields tend toward solo authorship, whereas those associated with quantitative subfields tend toward coauthorship, although there is variation within subfields (see also Moody 2004; Schwemmer and Wieczorek 2020). For instance, 59.1 percent of articles published in the cultural-sociological journal Poetics in the past five years were coauthored, while 46.5 percent of those in Cultural Sociology were coauthored in the same period.

Looking at overall averages for the entire life of each journal, the two recently created open-access journals land in the top five. Since their inaugural publication, 67.4 percent of articles in Socius and 74.8 percent in Sociological Science were coauthored. Furthermore, all 110 journals except 5 had higher average coauthoring in the past five years than their overall average. Taken together, these data suggest that sociology continues to embrace collaborative production.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-srd-10.1177_23780231231171115 – Supplemental material for Rising Coauthorship in Sociology, 1895 to 2022

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-srd-10.1177_23780231231171115 for Rising Coauthorship in Sociology, 1895 to 2022 by Dustin S. Stoltz in Socius