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 highimpact 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 (rs = 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 The results imply that tenure and promotion standards that privilege sole authorship may be outdated and that social workers seeking to create and disseminate scholarship in high-impact journals may benefit from developing collaborative networks.