Description

The number of authors per article in the subject area Dentistry is 5.5 on average with a maximum of 25 authors. The mean number of coauthors is increasing by 0.04 per year in the respective time period (Figure 1). The articles in this analysis (n = 1536) were cited 13.6 times on average with a maximum of 183 citations.

Figure 1: Boxplot of the number of authors per paper in the subject area Dentistry. The box denotes 25–75% of the values with the median (bold line) in it. The small circles are outliers. Due to a limitation of the y-axis, some outliers are not shown. The yellow line shows a linear model of the mean number of authors per article with a confidence interval of 0.95 shown in light grey. Data source: Scopus. CC BY 4.0 Schmidt, Fecher, Kobsda.

The number of authors per article in the subject area Health Professions is 3.7 on average with a maximum of 16 authors (Figure 2). The mean number of coauthors is increasing by 0.1 per year in the respective time period. The articles in this analysis (n = 808) were cited 7 times on average and 140 as maximum.

Figure 2: Boxplot of the number of authors per paper in the subject area Health Professions. The box denotes 25–75% of the values with the median (bold line) in it. The small circles are outliers. Due to a limitation of the y-axis, some outliers are not shown. The yellow line shows a linear model of the mean number of authors per article with a confidence interval of 0.95 shown in light grey. Data source: Scopus. CC BY 4.0 Schmidt, Fecher, Kobsda.

The number of authors per article in the subject area Nursing is 3.7 on average with a maximum of 61 authors. The mean number of coauthors is decreasing by 0.3 per year in the respective time period (Figure 3). The articles in this analysis (n = 1282) were cited 7.5 times on average with a maximum of 126 citations.

Figure 3: Boxplot of the number of authors per paper in the subject area Nursing. The box denotes 25–75% of the values with the median (bold line) in it. The small circles are outliers. Due to a limitation of the y-axis, some outliers are not shown. The yellow line shows a linear model of the mean number of authors per article with a confidence interval of 0.95 shown in light grey. Data source: Scopus. CC BY 4.0 Schmidt, Fecher, Kobsda.

The number of authors per article in the subject area Psychology is 4.1 on average with a maximum of 61 authors (Figure 4). The mean number of coauthors is increasing by 0.05 per year in the respective time period. The articles in this analysis (n = 954) were cited 14.4 times on average and 200 as maximum.

Figure 4: Boxplot of the number of authors per paper in the subject area Psychology. The box denotes 25–75% of the values with the median (bold line) in it. The small circles are outliers. Due to a limitation of the y-axis, some outliers are not shown. The yellow line shows a linear model of the mean number of authors per article with a confidence interval of 0.95 shown in light grey. Data source: Scopus. CC BY 4.0 Schmidt, Fecher, Kobsda.

Methodology

The results of the Advanced search in Scopus were restricted by an algorithm with

• a time period of publishing (2010 to 2016)
• the document types (articles or reviews),
• and a quantitative limitation regarding the publication output (articles by the 20 highest performing authors with the most Scopus listed articles in every subject area).

For details and code see Schmidt et al. 2017.