[Math] What proportion of math papers are collaborative

journalssociology-of-math

In this 2005 Notices article, Jerold Grossman tracks the proportion of papers in Math Reviews with 1, 2, 3, and >3 authors over time. His data set ends in 1999. I seem to recall reading that in 200k, for some value of k, the number of collaborative papers in math exceeded the number of single-authored papers for the first time. But I can't find any record of this. Does anyone know what k is, what a reliable source for this kind of data is, and what the proportion of collaborative papers is now?

Best Answer

According to the article, the original data was provided by the AMS. I don't think that the AMS leaves this sort of data lying around on laptops on trains, so do to it again you'd have to go and ask them. I suspect that, quite reasonably, the AMS likes to know what uses their data is put to.

On the other hand, data can be mined very easily from the arXiv via the API. I don't know if arXiv data would suffice for you. If so, a little scripting showed the following data for the month of October:

math.CO: 36, 38, 11, 7, 2, 1
math.CA: 9, 11, 5, 1, 1
math.CT: 4, 4, 3
math.GN: 6, 7, 2
math.AT: 18, 9, 2
math.AC: 6, 9, 4, 2
math.CV: 24, 16, 1
math.OC: 6, 11, 5, 3
math.MG: 7, 7, 4, , 1
math.HO: 14
math.DG: 43, 48, 16, 3, 1
math.LO: 9, 2, 2
math.RA: 12, 11, 7, , , 2
math.ST: 3, 14, 2
math.PR: 43, 45, 25, 7
math.GT: 29, 22, 4, 2
math.SG: 13, 4, 2
math.GM: 8
math.SP: 7, , 4, 1
math.FA: 22, 18, 9, 4
math.OA: 9, 6, 4, 3, 1
math-ph: 52, 53, 15, 2, 1
math.DS: 23, 17, 9, 2, 1
math.QA: 13, 13, 3
math.KT: 3, 1
math.GR: 17, 27, 3, 2
math.NA: 4, 13, 9
math.RT: 28, 14, 3
math.NT: 48, 31, 8, , , 1
math.AP: 49, 59, 29, 4
math.AG: 69, 34, 11, 1, 2
Total: 634, 544, 202, 44, 10, 4
Average: 0.44, 0.37, 0.14, 0.03, 0, 0

The ordering is by number-of-authors. So for math.KT there were 4 papers, of which 3 were single authored and 1 with 2 authors. Missing entries are 0s (so in math.NT there was a 6-author paper but none with 4 or 5). So collaborations outweigh single-author papers by a little bit (technical term).

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