Increasing number of authors per paper in Korean science and technology papers

Abstract

We examined changes in the number of authors per paper for science and technology papers (agricultural sciences, engineering and technologies, medical sciences, and natural sciences) in Korea. We employed the Scopus database to examine the change in the number of authors in papers, which were published from 2000 to 2015 in the 234 Korean academic journals indexed on Scopus. We found that the global trend of growth in the number of authors per paper is evident in Korea as well. While there was little evidence of a correlation with the citation per paper, a positive correlation was found between with the field-weighted citation impact, another measure of a paper’s impact, in medical and natural science papers. In terms of the type of collaboration, we found that international collaboration papers had the highest number of authors, followed by national and institutional collaborations. The number of authors per paper was highest for those published in the top 10% journals by Source Normalized Impact per Paper, followed by Scopus-indexed journals, while papers published in Korea Citation Index had the lowest number of authors per paper. We propose that the rise in the number of authors per paper in Korean papers may be ascribed to many Korean research programs encouraging group research and the widespread availability of the internet, which has stimulated joint research efforts and encouraged international collaboration.

Keywords

• author
• collaboration
• paper
• science
• technology