Trends in authorship characteristics and collaboration in pharmacy practice publications: 2011-2020

Research and scholarly publications are core expectations in academia that often require collaboration. While the number of authors per document (NAPD) has increased in every discipline, co-authorship culture and collaboration patterns vary among disciplines and countries.

To determine the trends in the patterns and characteristics of authorship and collaborations in United States' pharmacy practice faculty publications from 2011 to 2020.

Seven pharmacy practice journals were selected based on previous studies and data from Scimago Journal and Country Rank. Articles and reviews (document types) published during the decade were obtained from the Scopus database. Data cleaning and analysis were done using Microsoft Excel, R programming language packages, and VOSviewer. The Mann-Kendall trend test was used to determine the presence of (positive/negative) monotonic trends.

Eight thousand and fifty-nine documents published in the selected journals (82.7% articles; 17.3% reviews) by 18,575 unique authors during the decade were analyzed. In most documents (69.3-78.7%), senior/corresponding authors were first authors. There were statistically significant upward trends in the mean NAPD (3.8 ± 2.2 to 4.7 ± 2.4), median NAPD, and related bibliometric indices (degree of collaboration, collaborative index, and collaborative coefficient). Conversely, productivity (document per unique author) significantly trended downward and had a strong, negative correlation with mean NAPD. The proportion of one-author publications also trended downward (12.2%-3.6%). Evidence also supports a downward trend in institutional collaboration and an upward trend in international collaboration.

The assumption that last authors are senior authors does not hold in pharmacy practice publications. The increase in NAPD is not considered as authorship inflation, but rather an authorship "upcreep" that is driven by a survival strategy to publish together, predominantly within institutions rather than across institutions or countries. Therefore, faculty publication benchmarks should be crafted to mitigate the inverse relationship between collaboration and productivity, without discouraging collaboration.