Newman,ME . "Coauthorship networks and patterns of scientific collaboration." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America [0027-8424] 101 Suppl 1 (2004). 5200-5.

 

There is a very high rate of co-authorship in biology, a high rate in physics, and a somewhat lower rate in mathematics, though the rate in mathematics has been increasing along with the other fields. However, there is a lot of variation in the collaboration patterns among the sciences.  Also, collaborating leads to more collaboration. 

Moody,J . "The Structure of a Social Science Collaboration Network: Disciplinary Cohesion from 1963 to 1999" American sociological review [0003-1224] 69.2 (2004). 213-.

Cronin,B . "A cast of thousands: Coauthorship and subauthorship collaboration in the 20 th century as manifested in the scholarly journal literature of psychology and philosophy" Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology [1532-2882] 54.9 (2003). 855-.

 

Details the occurrence of co-authorships and acknowledgements in scholarly articles published in prepresentative journals from the fields of  psychology and philosophy. In the case of the psych journals, there has been a very steady increase in the number of co-authored articles over the past 100 years. While these social science articles do not includes the numbers of co-authors sometimes seen in STM articles (occasionally hundreds of authors can be listed in STM) this steady increase is in keeping with the notion of increased collaboration in scholarship. The philosophy articles are still generally produced by a single author in keeping with the general assumption that philosophers are lone scholars. However, since the 1950's, acknowledgements have appeared more and more frequently to the point where the great majority of articles include acknowledgements.

Cronin,B . "Hyperauthorship: A postmodern perversion or evidence of a structural shift in scholarly communication practices?" Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology [1532-2882] 52.7 (2001). 558-569.