Abstract
To what extent do sociologists collaborate? Has this changed over time? What factors contribute to research collaboration among sociologists? To answer these questions, we examine trends in collaboration over a 70 year period and empirically test a variety of explanations for the increase in collaboration that we find. We analyze data collected from a stratified random sample of articles in two leading sociology journals between 1935 and 2005 (n = 1274). Most of our analyses are descriptive and display trends over time. However, we pool the data across all years and estimate logistic regression models to assess the relative contribution of various factors. We find that the importance of geographical location has been waning since the 1950s, although the growth in cross-place collaborations stagnated between 1980 and 2005. We find that quantitative research is more likely to be collaborative, as are projects requiring data collection, though this may change because the collaboration rate among secondary data users is increasing at a faster rate. We find no significant gender differences in rates of collaboration, although male sole-authorship remains the most common form of publication. We also find the institutional prestige of coauthors is typically higher than that of sole-authors. Our results elucidate the extent of collaboration in sociology and reveal how several factors have contributed to this major shift in work organization.
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Notes
We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that because there may be a relationship between collaboration and the likelihood of publishing in a prestigious journal, rates of collaboration documented here may not adequately represent all sociological work.
From the sampling frame we excluded research and teaching notes, book reviews, comments and replies, bibliographies, obituaries, and all articles in supplemental issues.
Of the research teams that had at least two researchers residing outside the United States, researchers sharing a country shared an institution as well, in all cases but one. In this case, the researchers were at two different universities in one Canadian province, therefore, they were coded as residing in the same state and region.
These results hold even when we eliminate collaborative teams that may represent advisor-student pairs (i.e., when we eliminate collaborate teams that include a graduate student or assistant professor). Thus, we are confident that advisors and students who wrote papers at the same institution, but who happened to be at separate institutions in the year of publication, do not artificially inflate our estimate of research teams at “different institutions.”
We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this possibility.
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This research was supported by an award funded by Arizona’s Proposition 301 for Information Technology and Information Sciences.
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Hunter, L., Leahey, E. Collaborative Research in Sociology: Trends and Contributing Factors. Am Soc 39, 290–306 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-008-9042-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-008-9042-1