Authorship patterns and degree of collaboration of Sri Lankan scientific publications in Social sciences and Humanities – a picture from SCOPUS

I. INTRODUCTIONStudies on evaluation of academic productivity and quality have led to development of research productivity of a specific nation. Bibliometric studies may be broadly classified into two main groups-descriptive and behavioral studies. Descriptive studies are those which confine themselves to describing the characteristics or the features of a document or literature [1]. Authorship studies also descriptive bibliometric studies focused on authorship patterns. They describe author characteristics and authorship of articles and degree of collaboration of a specific group of authors.The starting point in an authorship study was to select a group of publications. This selection of publications forms the unit of analysis based on a research group. This study especially focuses on the authorship patterns and degree of collaboration of Sri Lanka in humanities and social science research with the records of publications derived from SCOPUS database. A total of 1795 records of publications authored by 3521 authors during the period 1960 - 2012 were analyzed in this study.II. OBJECTIVESThe principal objective of this study is to identify authorship patterns and degree of collaboration of Sri Lanka in social science researchThe specific objectives of the study are:* to identify the proportion of single vs. multi-authored papers* to determine the degree of collaboration and average number of authors per paper.III. HYPOTHESESThe following hypotheses were tested with appropriate statistical tools:H1 - There has been an increasing trend in collaborative research and Degree of collaboration.IV. RESEARCH PROBLEMNeed of determining the authorship characteristics of research articles published by Sri Lankan authors in the field of social sciences with particular reference to what are the characteristics and patterns in authorship of research articles published by Sri Lankan social scientists. Therefore, it is interesting to find out the authorship trend and degree of collaboration of authors in this study area for the benefit of the nation.V. SIGNIFICANCEWhen encouraging and developing the process of bibliometric study, it eventually supports for the evaluation of research performance and output of a particular field in a country. In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest of both in scholarly communications as a research area and the application of bibliometrics as a research method. In Sri Lanka, few bibliometric studies have been done especially by some Library and Information Science professionals. This study persuades library and information science professionals of Sri Lanka to conduct more authorship studies.VI. REVIEW OF LITERATUREVarious Bibliometric studies focused on authorship patterns were conducted to analyze the authorship characteristics of a group of authors. Selection of group of authors could be different in these studies.Some of them focused on group of authors of a specific country [2]; [3]; some others focused on a particular subject area [4]; [5]; some more focused on a particular type of publication or Journals [6]; [7]; [8]. VII. METHODOLOGYThe research method of this study was Bibliometric analytical method. In this study Bibliometric analytical soft ware namely Bibexcel, developed by Olle Persson [9], was used to identify authorship patterns and degree of collaboration of Sri Lanka in social science research. Each record of publications were checked, examined and tabulated for necessary authorship data in to separate sheets and analyzed using this software. Further application soft wares such as MS excel, Notepad++ are also used in view of necessity. Findings were interpreted with tabulated and graphical display.The required data for the analysis of this study was collected from SCOPUS database, considering the availability and reliability of data. The process of selection of population of publications was as follows: Affiliation - 'Sri Lanka' or 'Srilanka' or 'Ceylon', Publication year - '1960-2012' Document type - 'ALL'and the subject areas "Social sciences and Humanities". …