The Rise of Co-Authorship in Social Work Scholarship: A Longitudinal Study of Collaboration and Article Quality, 1989–2013

This study examined two issues critical to the social work research enterprise: (i) trends in authorship within disciplinary social work journals and (ii) the relationship between the number of authors and article quality, as measured via dissemination in high-impact journals. Data for the study were collected from original articles (N = 33,330) harvested from eighty disciplinary journals between 1989 and 2013. The results indicate the mean number of authors per article increased from 1.67 in 1989 to a high of 2.39 in 2013. The share of sole-authored articles dropped from roughly 60 per cent in the early 1990s to 35 per cent in 2013. Co-authorship became the norm in 2002, with the median number of authors increasing to two. Finally, the relationship between mean authorship per article and journal quality was significant (r s = 0.35). The results imply that tenure and promotion standards that privilege sole authorship may be outdated and that social workers seeking to create and disseminate scholarship in high-impact journals may benefit from developing collaborative networks.