Change in Academic Coauthorship, 1953–2003

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Abstract
Coauthored scholarship increased substantially across fields of science during the twentieth century, but it is unclear whether this growth reflects change in the behavior of individual scientists (i.e., career aging) or publishing differences between cohorts of researchers (i.e., cohort succession). I examine the publication records of an interdisciplinary sample of university scientists and find evidence of both career-aging and cohort-succession processes, although cohort differences are much more pronounced than individual changes. Specifically, scientists in this sample increased the percentage of their articles with coauthors by 0.63 percentage points annually. However, compared to those who received their PhDs between 1953 and 1962, scientists who entered the workforce between 1983 and 1991 coauthored approximately one third more of their early career articles (35.63 percentage points). Additionally, career-aging processes in coauthorship varied by PhD cohort, with earlier trained researchers increasing more rapidly. Overall, this article highlights cohort succession as a source of change in coauthorship, and underscores the importance of accounting for generational differences in studies of scientific careers.