By James Hartley

There is much debate in the scientific literature about whether or not two authors are better than one – where ‘better’ usually equates to receiving a higher number of citations. Most of the contributors to this debate do indeed conclude that co-authorship leads to more citations than does single-authorship – but not always (see for example Gazni and Thelwall, 2014; Hartley 2016; Hartley and Cabanac, 2016a; Hartley and Cabanac, 2016b; Thelwall and Sud, 2016).

However, few, if any of these studies, keep one author constant and compare the citation rates for that author writing alone with the citations he/she acquires when writing with one or more co-authors. The focus is more on the number of citations awarded to papers written by single, dual and joint authors.

In this note, however Continue reading →