The commentary by Philip Wyatt presented intriguing data confirming the evolution of increasingly multiple authorship. It prompts speculations on the social psychology of science. During five decades as a university professor, I experienced that evolution, both in the authorship of astrophysics and planetary-science papers and in research modes used by our graduate students.
Throughout my career I strove to create new physics ideas, in contrast to new data or calculations. Those single-author publications primarily involved seeking new interpretations of phenomena, and by virtue of being original they did not lend themselves to multiple authorship. My large number of single-author papers seems out of step today.
I observe that my single-author papers are not as heavily cited as my multiple-author works, and that my single-author papers are often uncited even by researchers that use the ideas from them. I suggest that the evolution to multiple authorship occurred in part because one’s work is more readily recalled when multiple coauthors also cite its significance. Multiple-author publications present not only the new idea but beefier sections on its consequences. Citing new single-author concepts is harder than citing new data or computations because we are often unsure later where new ideas came from.
A paper with coauthors is probably more likely to be recognized as seminal than one with a single author, and I expect that a citation index will show more citations to multiple-author papers. As an example, one of my publications, with two well-known coauthors, was chosen by the editors of the Astrophysical Journal as one of the 50 most influential papers of the 20th century.1 I have long puzzled that my best-known and most-cited papers are those having multiple coauthors. Perhaps having multiple coauthors increases one’s scientific visibility because coauthors citing its significance become vectors for that work. Mathematics of social networks (see the article by Adilson Motter and Réka Albert, Physics Today, April 2012, page 43) probably addresses that idea.
