One advantage is up to date knowledge transfer across the co-authors, which could also be defined as a form of education across researchers/ research teams/ research disciplines/ research cultures....

Yes. I believe that in most cases collaboration leads to higher academic productivity. This is especially true for interdisciplinary and experimental projects. Working with colleagues has many advantages including the fact the each author reviews the article and therefore the article has more chance of being accepted in the peer review process.

Has this issue been empirically studied, dear Mahfouz, to begin with?

My opinion about co authorship

present day research is interdisciplinary which automatically requires authors or researchers from different fields, which leads to collaborative efforts

and the out put will have co authors who are substantially responsible for the whole work.

The synergistic effect increases quality an saves valuable resources, like time and materials etc.

One advantage is up to date knowledge transfer across the co-authors, which could also be defined as a form of education across researchers/ research teams/ research disciplines/ research cultures....

Dear @Mahfuz. As you explained it nicely, my answer to your question is a big "yes" due to multidisciplinary nature of many of recent researches and investigations. Co-authorship will lead to more scientific researches. Ideally such a collaboration should be based on necessity and internationally to enhance the result and work, and not just for the sake of publishing or editing purposes only.

On second thought, my dear friends, co-authorship is by no means authorship! Am I correct? 

There are many reasons for co-authoring a paper.

Sometimes, it is difficult for junior faculty members to break into the publishing world at the beginning of their career.

One way to begin establishing a reputation is to affiliate with established faculty members and collaborate on work that is likely to be published.  In most cases, co-authorship is between two or more authors, to save time and effort for all of them.

Dear @ Mahmoud. Ideally such a collaboration should be based on necessity and internationally to enhance the result and work, and not just for the sake of publishing or editing purposes only. Nicely said.

Yes I do agree that co-authorship aimed at inducing collaboration between authors, increasing their productivity, and improving the researches quality. However, each should take a full responsibility of his/her part of the work within the planned time.

Co-authorship can make researchers more productive as then, they can specialize on what they do best: e.g. data analysis or writing literature reviews; they can get data from many countries without having to collect it themselves, and co-authors can have some good ideas sometimes, too. On the other hand, sometimes, such co-operation fails because people do not have enough time or they do not understand one another well enough or for some other reasons, and this may reduce productivity.

Collaboration between scientists in research & in co-authorship of  research papers could be synergistic or antagonistic. It really depends on the persons involved ; they may produce something coherent & systematic or they may produce something messy & heterogeneous. Add to it, there is no guarantee that there will be "co-refreeing" which has meant, many times, rejection of papers and then raising questions by those involved "Why Journal so & so refused our paper?".

I think that if it is done honestly then it sure leads to more scientific researches; otherwise it only leads to more names on the same article.

I agree with Dear Marcel that data knowledge transfer across the co-authors is beneficial to all.

In my humble opinion, the following are other reasons that co-authorship may increase the research productivity assuming that team members are all knowledgeable, competent, flexible and trustworthy:

• With discussion with co-authors may result in new ideas
• With competent and trustworthy co-authors the quality can be improved
• Nowadays, many projects are Multidisciplinary and these projects require experts in different fields
• Working in a team motivates all members and acts as an external pressure! 

my experience with the co-athorship is absolutely positive, the collaboration results in an effective synergism when the interests, knowledge, goals and ideas are similar and the contribution is equal

Co-authorship, is great provided that the co-author is the appropriate one. I had negative experiences as well.

I am of the opinion this depends of the type of personality of the author responsible for the preparation of the paper and the composition of the team of co-authors. If you have a active author, then he will lead the team and will keep direct contact with other researchers involved in the preparation of the paper. This type of author will ask directly to other researchers their help for the preparation of the paper indicating what kind of assistance he need. He will also give directly guidance to each co-authors what they should do and the tasks to be carried out by them. On the contrary, if you have a less active author, then co-authors could have a more active role during the preparation of the paper and they will be responsible for the direct contact with other researchers.

Dear @Mahfuz,co-authorship may lead to more scientific researches, but  may also lead to overproduction of scientific papers and monographs, and this brings into question the quality of published papers!

Dear all,

I have seen papers written in the first half of the 20th century where authors explain contribution made by each of them. 

I have the impression that the present tendency to publish papers with several authors independently of their contribution goes back to the USA, precisely to the sputnik era excitement.

If coauthors complement each other then it is a perfect tool for expanding each other’s knowledge and sometimes to obtain results in a relatively short period of time.

On the other extreme we have widespread cheating. Surprisingly governments  speak about saving funds but there is no any attempt to organize science funding in a way which will reduce the unnecessary waste of money.

I am with Dear Costas, I've had a few bad coauthors, however, most have been superlative and more than half my articles are with one or more authors. For me, I say yes, co-authors make for more and better articles.

I rather agree with Ljubomir. In some case .co-authorship clearly lead to more scientidic results, but in some case is not. There is a good paper about this issue in Lab Times 2 years ago. In natural scioence sometimes one can find up to 10 co-author, but only 3-4 of them have a real contribution to the results.  

Dear @ Ljubomir. I agree with you that co-authorship may also lead to overproduction of scientific papers and monographs, and this brings into question the quality of published papers. The quality of published papers is a critical issue which we cannot trade off with the number of researches.

It depends. 

I  prefer to be independent in my research, but I have had experienced co - authorship as well, and it was interesting process. If your co - author / is / are productive and can contribute , be responsible for the work, and if you all make good team, then why not? 

http://www.lisatener.com/2013/06/should-i-have-a-co-author-pros-and-cons-of-collaborating-on-a-book/

https://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers-professional-development/research-governance-and-organisation/professional-conduct/criteria-for-attribution-and-co-authorship-in-research

Co-authorship is primarily of two kinds. The one involves student and the senior mentor or his group associates and the other involves different institutes and possibly spread spatially. The former is educative and encouraging a youngster. The second one can vary in purpose. If the collaborators have joined together because of different facilities existing at different places whose access is easier to different collaborators and if the collaborators have shown genuine interest in carrying out a big problem collectively .  collaboration is justified. Yes it leads to more output and also quality output. Collaborating (senior) authors must meet to discuss nitty gritty details and hold meetings and also distribute work and it is purposeful to have such collaborations.

i think it depends on whether you seek for collaborations to "actually" broaden your knowledge and advance your research, or, to simply earn more and better publications. Although they usually go hand in hand, there is some subtle differences between playing around with publication game rules and real scientific inquiries. 

In my opinion, whether co-authorship would bring pros or cons is really depending on the main intention involved. Collaboration between scientists or researchers in their research & co-authorship of research papers could be of synergistic or antagonistic effects. If it is done honestly and efforts (contribution) put by each of the involving co-authors are justified, then this will ensure more productive yet purposeful scientific researches. Vice versa, if the effort of co-authorship is used for other purpose, it might leads to more co-authors being named on the same article. This indeed will bring harm to scientific researches as unjustified publication are being published for the sake of getting names published in certain articles. 

For some times it is good to increase number of papers but after reaching a number it is a negative point. It is my opinion only, collaboration does not mean your involvement and improved knowledge-set.

Yes, if you are involved in the project then its fantastic.

It depends upon the competency, area of expertise  and contribution of the co-author.

There are many advantages and disadvantages for co-authorship. I think one of the main disadvantages of co-authorship... when ther are too many co-authors, may be 15 or more, only few of them have a real contribution to the research efforts. That is really a big problem that needs discussion.

Dear @Mahfuz. Nowadays this is not impossible and it can happen. For example, I found a publication with 3171 co-authors! Many research projects are now undertaken by large collaborations who list all collaboration members as authors on the resulting peer-reviewed journal publications like this one:. 

"Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC" with 3171 authors

Look at this link for more publications of this sort:

http://www.quora.com/What-academic-paper-has-the-most-co-authors#

Dear everybody.

I´m still impressed with Mahmoud´s comment. I´ve checked the reference and I only could say: "Wow!"

Well, I think that coauthorship is very helpful specially when you have authors from more than one country. There are different points of view, one fact that, in my opinion, will definitely improve the final results.

It depends whether coauthor actively involved or just a guide or a facilitator

Dear @ Mahmoud. In fact, I looked for two minutes to the number of co-authors of the article you attached, and I was shocked. Just the names and details of the co-authors took many pages of the research.

I think it is difficult to calculate the contribution of each co-author or to identify the real effort exerted by each one of the co-authors.

Not necessarily!

Authorship may be reward for scientific effort!

Period!

Dear Prof. Mahfouz,

I believe in the "Unity of Science" and I think it is better to work with co-authors if they can handle part of the job. I prefer to work within a team of researchers from different fields as I work on a multidisciplinary research topics. To be honest, I can't do it alone. For example, I was working with a team of 14 researchers on a project that is funded by NASA in parallel with another team of 34 researchers, and all of us presented our work in a single exceptional poster: http://www.stce.be/esww10/contributions/public/posters/Session10/07-LekaK.D./Workshops_Poster.pdf  at the space weather workshop http://vsp-rosebud.dls.ucar.edu/spaceweather/abstracts_detail.php?recid=2027

I believe that working with co-authors improves the quality of any research work. 

Regards

MOhammad

http://vsp-rosebud.dls.ucar.edu/spaceweather/abstracts_detail.php?recid=2027

http://www.stce.be/esww10/contributions/public/posters/Session10/07-LekaK.D./Workshops_Poster.pdf

co-authorship can lead to more authors but not necessarily to more research. This is for the cases where co-authorship is the tool of some to infiltrate to the club of researchers or to be promoted using the works of others. On the positive side, yes, collaboration and co-authorship are the real tools for a more research of more quality especially in multidisciplinary areas and big projects. Thanks. @Aldmour

I agree to your nice statement dear Ismat, "co-authorship can lead to more authors but not necessarily to more research" That is really what happen. It is a fact.

Co-authorship does not necessarily mean more number of researches or articles..

Research productivity can go up, in case of "teamed contribution". But in reality, in many research publications it has become mandatory to list all the stake holders as authors.

Co-authorships indicates team efforts and team spirit - and cumulatively may lead to more researches in an overall manner -- also more credits/achievements

Single authorship can be traceable to individuals. As science has grown more complex, joint- or multiply- authored journal articles have increased dramatically, and what constitutes authorship has become more of an issue (Syrett & Rudner, 1996).

There are many problems attached to co-authorship. Although first authorship is often perceived as more prestigious or important than last author in some disciplines, other disciplines have adopted alphabetical authorship as the predominant method of dealing with this issue, but even this can vary from journal to journal (Endersby, 1996).

Hi, 

I think  co-authorship add to the quality of the scientific research and enrich it

I agree with all above..

Co authorship will increase quality of research as well it reduces burden on single author with cooperation of it..

Dear Kamal,

In addition to the "riding" phenomena in the authorship, there is also a big dilemma in the ordering of co-authors names. Our colleague Mahmoud found a publication with 3171 co-authors.

One way to solve this problem is to list authors by contribution, that is, in descending order of their contribution to the paper. Another way is to list them alphabetically. The problem here, is that alphabetical ordering benefits those whose last names start with letters that occur earlier in the alphabet.

For more details look at the following link on, “The Authorship Dilemma: Alphabetical or Contribution? By: Margareta Ackerman & Simina Branzei.

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~maackerman/Authorship.pdf

Dear Mahfuz,

I dont think it is an issue or big issue. You don't need to remember them. Citing such papers is not difficult even with 3171 co-authors!

In-text: FirstAuthor et al.

Reference List: First few names do the job (Check journal guideline)

it depends on how you extend the research, if the issue in topic is a continuous one and leads to more questions .Co-authoring a research work does not mean more work  is done,it only helps for rubbing of minds and transfer of knowledge and knowledge sharing.A good work is a good work whether co-authored or not.But we cannot over-emphasisze the need to collaborate in research for wider coverage and greater input,Prof.

Co-authorship enables different reseachers to bring in different skills to the research project and has potential to improve the research output and needs to  be encouraged.

Yes, dear Umesh, this is the real teamwork and the case co-authorship should be. Co-authorship enables different researchers to bring in different skills to the research project.

The problem is not with the high number of co-authors in a research, but with the "riding" phenomena in the authorship and the unfair contribution of co-authors in the research.

In practice, we use networks to get responses on a broad variety of questions. Some people requested others through ResearchGate to conduct a joint research.

Although they are colleagues, but it is possible that they do not know each other well enough to work with each other as co-authors. What would you do in that case? Would you agree or you do not? What do you say in that situation?

It is already happening. You do not need to know each other, if your intentions are^Don^t be Evil^.But even Google slips, interventions, market forces,discussions, back ground search are needed.Necessity is the mother of invention

Dear Nirmal,

“”You do not need to know each other, if your intentions are “Don`t be Evil”. But even Google slips, interventions, market forces, discussions, back ground search are needed.””

Do you really believe those checks will be enough to work with other co-authors on a good research.

Dear Mahfuz Judeh 

Yes I do believe. But I am not exposed to academic Research . However I opine the following.

(Well my life was with industry , understanding technology, implementing the technology where I collaborated with colleagues known to me)

• The real test of pudding is in  the eating. Experiments are required to a good research. The expertise level or the area of research  , where multiple disciplines are  involved one has limited choice. It will boil down to find the lesser known evil. With open source and MOOC environment as well as  in ResearchGate we do find intellectual participation freely.Why not try the path not travelled yet in academic institution too.

Dear colleagues,                                                                                                                 First off all, thanks for your input in this very interesting discussion about co-authorship in relation to more scientific researches.

It is not obvious that co-authorship leads to more research projects. In my professional live (retired since 2007), I have more than 400 national and international articles written along with more than 100 coauthors. It was very stimulating and motivating to work with all these colleagues.

In about 30% have a coauthorship led to new research projects under the supervision of a coauthor and in about 30% they participated in ongoing research projects. In 40% it was coauthorship off or restricted to a limited number of articles without a sequel.

Is this exceptional? I have asked this to several colleagues and they gave about the same percentages. In the Netherlands research in the allied health care (specifically in the field of physiotherapy) takes place in the academic setting and only limited outside of the academic setting in primary care. The appointment as a researcher is often for a limited period (PhD four years). Only a limited number of researchers have an appointment as postdoctoral researcher and conduct new research projects. The other researchers abandoned after their PhD the academic setting and are employed in hospitals, rehabilitation centers and private practices. The patient care is central in these settings and to a lesser extent, scientific research.

For researchers in my field of physiotherapy co-authorschap is a very valuable but does not necessarily lead to more research projects.

Nijmegen, September 7, 2014

Rob Oostendorp.

Co-authorship network between authors

The use of social network analysis as a methodology for building a map of e-Government (EGOV)  and consequently contributing to the process of establishing e-Government (EGOV) identity

http://www2.fu.uni-lj.si/iiu/Clanki/Co-Autorship_Network_Analysis_in_the_e-Government_Research_Field.pdf

Krishnan  Uamachandran

Thanks for the link. 

Dear @ Prof Rob,

Thank you for your detailed and thorough answer and for the information you included. I think co-authorship in most disciplines does not necessarily lead to more scientific researches.

Dear Krishnan,

The co-authorship network can assist scholars who look for co-authors from outside their countries.

"In comparison to other types of networks which can be constructed for the purpose of bibliographic and scientomentric analysis, the co-authorship networks are assumed to imply strong social bonds between actors who collaborated in their research (Liu, et al, 2005). The latter fact relates strongly to the observation that a co-authorship signifies a temporal and collegial relationship, connecting authors with similar research interests into sub-groups within the particular scientific field community".

The article you have attached with your post is informative and it gives a good idea about the co-authorship network.

Thanks to all for generating a good discussion

Dear Krishnan,

I think that the co-authorship network is a new dimention in our discussion. It deserves much of our concern. Thank you for bringing up the subject.

Dear Marwan asked a Question in page 1.

 The results of a very relevant article are as follows: These conclusions is actually very consistent with the conclusions we make from 60 responses!

First, greater collaboration leads to higher academic productivity even after discounting by the number of authors working on an article. The positive relationship between intellectual collaboration and intellectual output is in contrast with Medo (2003) and Hollis(2001), who fd a negative relationship between co-authorship and academic output.

Second, co-authorship selection is endogenous { i.e. authors choose with whom to work depending on the quality and difficulty of their projects, which shows that previous results might be spurious. Specificaly, the results turn from a significant negative effect of co-authorship on individual academic productivity in the baseline model to a significant positive effect in the specification after controlling for the endogenous team formation.

Third, over-specialization is detrimental to an authors' productivity. I also found evidence about the presence of peer effects and congestion externalities in academic research.

Finally, the effect of co-authorship on economists' productivity varies significantly between the different types of individuals. More able authors obtain more benefits from teamwork.

For example, authors whose first publication productivity is below the median do not obtain statistically significant benefit from co-authorship.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537101000410

Dear Behrouz,

You mean Mahfouz (not Marwan) in your answer above. Thanks for the reference, anyway!

Dear Behrouz and dear Marwan,

Thanks for both of you. I also would appreciate the full detailed answer posted by Dr Behrouz in this thread.

I think, most scholars in medical, biological and natural sciences conduct and publish collaborative research; this leads to a hypothesis that co-authorship helps a great deal in improving quality and publishability of research in these fields. 

In Researchgate I have made great contacts with scientists from different countries. Definitely, productivity is increasing due to the current cooperation and the quality of the research is increasing as well.

Yes dear Jolita. Most of us have contacts with other colleagues and scientists in ResearchGate for joint researches and projects.

Modern science increasingly involves “collaborative research", and this is integral to the social structure of science. The study of the dynamics of co-authorship networks has been conditioned by the development of quantitative methodological approaches in various forms that include relatively simple descriptive statistics presented in time-series form, deterministic approaches, and stochastic agent based modeling of network dynamics.

http://patrickdoreian.com/NEW/wp-content/papers_resources/new_papers_4-13/dynamic_scientific_coauthorship_networks.pdf

Yes, a team work will be mostly better than an individual person work.

Team research always leads to a larger number of papers.

Quality is a different issue.