Multi-authorship and Research Analytics

Abstract

The Web of Science has identified a growing number of research articles with 1,000 or more unique authors across more than 100 different countries. The combination of many authors/many countries creates a complex authorship pattern that differs from more typical academic papers and drives elevated citation rates. In this report we describe two patterns linking complex authorship with effects that increase citation rates: a general increase associated with multi-authorship (more than 10 authors and more than five countries); and more perturbing outcomes of hyper-authorship (more than 100 authors spread across more than 30 countries).