The Growth of Scholarly Collaboration in Business Journals

The faculty of colleges of business are under increased pressure to publish in order to earn tenure and promotions. One result of this pressure is the increasing trend in co-authorship in business journals. Twelve major business journals were reviewed for the periods 1960-62, 1970-72, 1980-82, 1990-92 and 2000-02 to analyze the growing trend in co-authorship. During this period, all journals experienced: 1) significant increases in the average number of authors per article, and 2) significant increases in the percentages of two and three co-authored articles. Colleges of business must recognize the need for faculty to collaborate in publishing endeavors and must address how to appropriately recognize and reward faculty based upon accurate assessment of the contribution to a journal article. Further, universities must consider those academic disciplines where co-authorships are prevalent and learn to appropriately recognize this arrangements as a legitimate form of scholarly endeavor. During the past several decades, advancement in academic careers and the awarding of tenure to faculty have become more directly linked to a record of scholarly endeavors. Previously, teaching, student counseling, and university service such as committee work were major determinants in the faculty reward system. University missions have changed and pressures from accrediting agencies have been instrumental in the movement toward faculty reward systems becoming heavily based on research and other scholarly endeavors (Garfield, 1995). Consequently, faculty have collaborated more on research projects resulting in increased levels of multiple authorships in published works in academic journals. In our recent study of six business journals representing the major business disciplines it was revealed that over 70 percent of the articles published were co-authored between 2000 and 2002 (Manton and English, 2007). Background What level of scholarly collaboration existed in business journals 30 or 40 years ago? Other fields have reported significant increases in co-authorship over the years. Medicine and social work have been identified as fields where multiple authorship has become the norm (Gelman and Gibelman, 1999). The trend in increasing co-authorships in business journals over the years has been analyzed by several authors and they have found increased levels of multiple authorships in business and economic journals. Petry and Kerr (1981) reviewed 15 business journals finding that the average number of authors per article grew from 1.57 to 1.77 between 1973 and 1977. Then Petry and Settle (1988), following up on his and Kerr's study, reported that for 19 business journals ". the overall trend in co-authorship has continued to rise as shown from an earlier study by Petry and Kerr (198 1)" (p. 173). Michael Fields and Linda Swayne (1988), reviewed the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing, and the Journal of Marketing Research for coauthorship trends. They found between the periods 196064 and 1985-86 that the percentage of articles having two authors increased from 15% to 44% and that articles with three or more authors rose from 2% to 21%. Steven M. Floyd, Dean M. Schroeder, and Dale M. Finn (1994) found that ". the proportion of multi-authored articles in the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, and Administrative Science Quarterly increased from 18.3%inthe 1960s to 47.7% in the 1970s and to 60.1% in the 1980s" (p. 134). The growing trend in multi-authored journal articles in the field of economics was considered by John Hudson (1996) who reported that in 1950, 6% of the papers published in the Journal of Political Economy and 8% of the papers published in the American Economic Review had a single author. But by 1993, the proportion of multi-authored papers in these two journals had grown to 39.6% and 54.9% respectively. Apparently, however, no one has conducted a broad and systematic review of a large number of business related journals over an extensive period of time to see what the trend in multiple authorship has been. …