Table 5. Percentage of co-authors from the same institution or geographical area

gender of authors

Gender was recorded for all authors for whom it was explicitly stated or could be inferred; this could be determined for 861 papers, with 1021 authors. As no attempt was made to maintain a list of names, it is unknown how many unique individuals are represented in that total. Approximately four-fifths of the authors were male (Table 6), with male authors being in the majority for each journal.

Gender      Number       Percentage      
male        804          78.7%           
female      217          21.3%           

Table 6. Gender of authors

The preponderance of male authors appears to mirror the under-representation of women in the Management/IS disciplines of academia, in which opportunities for publication and research are more likely than in commercial enterprises ([12], [21]). IS departments are generally located within the business or management faculty in universities, where women tend to be over-represented as instructors, lecturers, contract researchers, and other untenured staff positions. In the mid-eighties in the US, for example, women held 52% of the instructor and lower teaching positions and 36% of the assistant professorships in business schools, but accounted for only 6% of the full [2]. These lower level positions provide fewer opportunities for research funding, and generally involve a higher teaching load (with proportionally less time for research).

Next, we examine the question of whether or not males and female have the same patterns of collaboration and co-authorship (Table 7). The percentage of male authors who published a single-authored paper is 37.31% ([343 male single authors] / [804 male authors]); the percentage of female authors who published solo is 18.89% ([41 single author females] / [217 female authors]). The percentage of male authors involved in male-only co-authored papers is 42.66% ([343 / 804]), while the percentage of female authors who published in female-only groups is 6.91% (15/217). Clearly, then, a female author is more likely to co-publish than a male author, and more likely to publish in mixed gender research teams.

              single       multiple      single       multiple        multiple          
              male author  authors,      female       authors,        authors, male     
                           male only     author       female only     and female        
number        300          343           41           15              161               
percentage    34.9%        39.9%         4.8%         1.7%            18.7%             

Table 7. Gender composition of publishing teams

4. Conclusions

The high proportion of multiply-authored papers is characteristic of the physical and life sciences rather than the social sciences. In the "hard" sciences the percentage of co-authored articles is reported to range from two-thirds and up ([5], [13]), with nearly universal co-authorship in fields for which research is based on complex, expensive instruments/equipment ([14], as reported in [9]). By way of contrast, the proportion of single-authored papers is much higher in the humanities and social sciences: in philosophy, for example, collaboration is so unusual that some researchers find it difficult to imagine how a joint project could be produced [19]. Even in these disciplines, however, sub-fields may vary in their degree of collaboration, often reflecting equipment or team needs outside the norm for that discipline (for example, biophysical and archaeological anthropology show higher degrees of collaboration than sociocultural and linguistic anthropology [4]). IS, then, seems to fit more into the multiply-authored norm of the physical or experimental sciences than the humanities/social sciences.

This point is slightly muddied, however, when comparing the mean number of authors in IS with the mean of other fields (Table 8). IS articles tend to have a smaller average number of co-authors than the "hard" sciences, even though the rate of co-authorship is high. Two hypotheses present themselves: that the experimental team needed to support IS research is smaller than the team size necessary for managing the instruments for the physical sciences; and/or that the support personnel for IS research may not be acknowledged with authorship, as seems to be the case in some of the sciences.

Discipline             authors/paper      year(s) of study    Reference       
Library science        1.17               1989-90             [17]            
Counseling             1.45               1971-1982           [8]             
Anthropology           1.79               1983                [4]             
Applied, physical,     2.13               1978-1980           [20]            
analytical chemistry                                                          
Chemical engineering   2.13                                   [22]            
Biomedicine (basic     2.21               1961-1978           [18]            
life sciences)                                                                
Biomedicine            2.25               1961-1978           [18]            
(preclinical basic                                                            
research)                                                                     
Biochemistry           2.41               1978-1980           [20]            
Biomedicine            2.71               1961-1978           [18]            
(clinical research)                                                           
Biochemistry           2.72                                   [22]            
Chemistry              2.82               1974-1975           [11]            
Schistosomiasis        2.92               1972-1986           [15]            
Political Science      3.54               1974-1975           [11]            
Biology                3.97               1974-1975           [11]            
Psychology             4.58               1974-1975           [11]            
Astronomy &            7.4                1974                [1]             
astrophysics                                                                  

Table 8. Average number of authors for a variety of fields

The degree of collaboration in IS that crosses institutional and geographic boundaries is significant, and warrants further attention—in particular, to investigate the communication techniques that support co-authorship. Traditionally, collaboration occurs through face-to-face meetings, telephone, and postal correspondence; it is likely that email and other Internet-based communication modes also see significant use, given the naturally high degree of computer literacy in this field.

References

[1]Abt, H. A. (1984) "Citations to single and multiauthored papers," Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 96, 746-749.

[2]Aisenberg, N., and Harrington, M. (1988) Women of Academe, University of Massachusetts Press.

[3]Beaver, D. de B., and Rosen, R. (1979) "Studies in scientific collaboration Part III: Professionalization and the natural history of modern scientific co-authorship," Scientometrics 1(3), 231-245.

[4]Choi, J.M. (1988) "An analysis of authorship in anthropology journals, 1963 & 1983," Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian 6(3/4), 85-94.

[5]Clarke, B.L. (1964) "Multiple authorship trends in scientific papers,' Science 143, 882-884.

[6]Crane, D. (1972) Invisible colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific communities, University of Chicago Press.

[7]Cunningham, S.J. (1996) "An empirical investigation of the obsolescence rate for information systems literature." Working Paper Series 95/16, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. To appear in Library and Information Science Research..

[8]Gladding, S. (1984) "Multiple authorship in the Personnel and Guidance Journal: a 12-year study), Personnel and Guidance Journal, June, 628-630.

[9]Gordon, M.D. (1979) "A critical reassessment of inferred relations between multiple authorship, scientific collaboration, the production of papers and their acceptance for publication," Scientometrics 2(3), 193-201.

[10]Harsanyi, M.A. (1993) "Multiple authors, multiple problems—Bibliometrics and the study of scholarly collaboration: a literature review," LISR 15, 325-354.

[11]Heffner, A.G. (1981) "Funded research, multiple authorship and subauthorship collaboration in four disciplines," Scientometrics 3, 231-.

[12]McKeen, C.A., and Bujaki, M.L. (1994) "Taking women into account", CA Magazine, 127 (2), pp. 29-35.

[13]Meadows, A.J. (1974) Communication in Science. London: Butterworths.

[14]Meadows, A.J., and O'Connor, J.G. (1971) "A survey in depth of a selected information field (astronomy and astrophysics). Astronomy Department, University of Leicester.

[15]Pao, M.L. (1992) "Global and local collaborators: a study of scientific collaboration," Information Processing & Management 28(1), 99-109.

[16]Price, Derek J. de Solla. (1963) Little science, big science. New York: Columbia University Press.

[17]Raptis, P. (1992) "Authorship characteristics in five international library science journals," Libri 42(1), 35-52.

[18]Satyanarayana, K. and Ratnakar, K.V. (1989) "Authorship patterns in life sciences, preclinical basic and clinical research papers," Scientometrics 17(3-4), 363-371.

[19]Sievert, D., and Sievert, ME. (1989) "Philosophical Research: report from the field," Proceedings of the Humanists at Work symposium (April, Chicago, ILL, USA). Published by the University of Illinois at Chicago.

[20]Stefaniak, B. (1982) "Individual and multiple authorship of papers in chemistry and physics," Scientometrics 4(4), 331-337.

[21]Still, L.V. (1993) Where to from here? The managerial woman in transition, Business and Professional Publishing.

[22]Subrahmanyam, K., and Stephens, E.M. (1982) "Research collaboration and funding in biochemistry and chemical engineering," International Forum on Information and Documentation 7, 26-.