Does it make sense to limit the scientific co-authorship? There is no inflation of authors in Social Sciences and Education in Spain
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/redc.2018.2.1499Keywords:
Bibliometrics, research evaluation, scientific collaboration, Social Sciences, scientific authorship, Spain, co-authorshipAbstract
This paper analyses the evolution of co-authorship in Spain in the Social Sciences for the period from 2000 to 2013. The goal is to explore to what extent limitations on the number of co-authors established by Spanish national evaluation agencies are justified. The analysis of 11,681 papers authored by researchers affiliated to Spanish institutions in 20 subject categories from the social sciences reveals that there is no inflation in the number of authors, team size is similar to that found in foreign papers from similar areas and the number of authors is dependent on international and institutional collaboration. With the exception of the areas of Anthropology and Special Education, the average number of authors by paper is never higher than four. However, the papers receiving more citations are those with a higher number of authors. Overall, our results suggest that there is no justification on limiting the number of co-authors in publications, acknowledging that the criteria employed by Spanish evaluation agencies is to prevent honorary authors. Such limitation endangers institutional and international collaboration, and consequently, can have a potentially damaging impact in research.
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