On the extinction of the single-authored paper: The causes and consequences of increasingly collaborative applied ecological research

Abstract

In 1963, Price analysed authorship patterns in chemical science and identified that “…the proportion of multi‐author papers has accelerated steadily and powerfully, and it is now so large that if it continues at the present rate, by 1980 the single‐author paper will be extinct” (Price, 1963). An analysis of all research papers published in Journal of Applied Ecology since 1966 shows that the trends identified by Price also apply to our field: an exponential increase in the mean number of authors per published article has been mirrored by a sharp decline in the proportion of single‐authored papers (Figure 1). From over 60% of all publications in the 1960s, single‐author papers now make up less than 4% (averaged over the past 10 years). Although the single‐author paper has hung on well beyond 1980 in Journal of Applied Ecology, their extinction now appears imminent.