In academic writing, there is a recent call for having collaborators, shared credits and shared writings. This helps in improving the peer reviewed work and also increases the chances of more citations. It also offers higher citeability, higher technical significance, higher impact and better readership. However, do you support single-authored papers or multiple-authored papers?
As an author who has published within both single authored papers and multiple authored papers, I prefer the later. However, some institutions require single authored papers to be considered for promotion from senior lecturers to assistant professorship roles.
Some other places like in Nigerian universities grade the lecturers for promotions based on the number of Q1 and Q2 international journals, and also preferably those where they have less authors (like 2, 3 or 4) - not really single authored papers.
In China, I learnt they score based on the quality of the journals - as high impact journals are preferred, mainly Q1 and Q2 journals, and also if you are the first author, lead author or/and corresponding author.
There are also some experts or scholars with the opinion that multiple-authored papers are of higher quality than single-authored paper, although that position is subject to debate. Do you think that there should be a question of quality consideration for scoring research output?
To me, I would appreciate better collaborators as co-authors, but it is not usually the case. The first authors mostly do about 55-85% of the work in multiple authored papers. Also, my take based on lessons learnt personally is that a single-author paper requires more work from the author, more time, more effort, more responsibility, more research, more writing, hence it is much more work.
Thus, I will support the motion that a single-author article should have a higher score than a multiple-author paper. However, feel free to share your thoughts. Do you support single-authored papers or multiple-authored papers?
I think that there is no either-or in this question. It depends entirely on the research field and other circumstances whether a publication is written alone or together with others.
See also these related discussions:
https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_do_you_think_about_multiple_author_papers
https://www.researchgate.net/post/What-do-you-think-about-articles-where-the-list-of-coauthors-is-bigger-than-the-article-itself
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Group_Authorship_is_there_a_minmum_and_maximum
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_there_a_limit_to_the_number_of_authors_on_any_scientific_publication_regardless_of_disciplineWhat_is_the_number_of_restrictions_if_there_are_any
https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-many-maximum-number-of-authors-are-enough-in-a-research-paper
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Mesmerizing_list_of_authors_5_154_in_one_article_research_break_through_is_a_group_activity_but_do_we_need_to_include_whole_community
https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_do_you_think_about_single_author_paper
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Single_author_papers_vs_multiple_ones_which_ones_have_more_value
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Solo_author_vs_multi_authors_papers_which_is_more_reliable
If supervisors don't put enough time to help their students in preparing a paper, it doesn't make sense to include their names. Be that as it may, nowadays, faculty members take advantage of being in charge of a lab or providing students with funds, expecting them to do 99.99 % of the work. That's why you see many professors don't have their knowledge updated over the course of time, and yet their h-index goes up incessantly, enabling them to become full professors while their knowledge might be as much as a student's.
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