Abstract
Nature and Science—the top ranked, high impact multidisciplinary scientific journals with considerably low acceptance rate below 10%. As such, publication in these is considered to be a “Holy Grail” in disseminating ground-breaking scientific results. With marginal and permanently decreasing share, solo author articles (SAAs) represent rare category among these. Here I show what careers are behind the 334 SAAs published between 2003 and 2017, what is their impact and the relationship between the impact and careers behind. Obtained results indicate that the careers behind the SAAs vary from early to mature stages, confirming the role of researchers in different career stages in dynamics of science, even on the very top level. Geographical distribution is more unbalanced—the authors from the USA unambiguously dominated in production of SAAs (64.07%) among 28 countries involved and the authors affiliated with Harvard University among 195 institutions (4.49%). While Ecology represent the most frequent main WOS category of the authors among the SAAs published in Science (10.6%), Geochemistry Geophysics lead in Nature (14.4%). High variability is observed also in the impact of SAAs, represented by obtained citations per year, in relation to the individual research areas (WOS categories) as well as to the stages of authors’ careers represented by four quantitative characteristics. Despite the highly cited SAAs (> 1000 cit.; > 100 cit./year) were exclusively published by the authors previously experienced with publishing in Nature/Science, the entire dataset indicates that no clear relationship exists between juvenility or maturity of authors’ careers and the impact of published SAAs, leading to the conjecture that the impact might rather be controlled by specific article related factors such as quality, novelty and the interest of the subject.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ambros, V. (2004). The functions of animal microRNAs. Nature, 431(7006), 350–355. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02871.
Clarivate Analytics. (2018). Web of science. http://webofknowledge.com. Accessed in 10, 2018.
Da Silva, J. A. T., & Dobranszki, J. (2018). Multiple versions of the h-index: Cautionary use for formal academic purposes. Scientometrics, 115(2), 1107–1113. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2680-3.
Dotson, B., McManus, K. P., Zhao, J. J., & Whittaker, P. (2011). Authorship and characteristics of articles in pharmacy journals: Changes over a 20-year interval. Annals of Pharmacotherapy, 45(3), 357–363. https://doi.org/10.1345/aph.1P610.
Franzoni, C., Scellato, G., & Stephan, P. (2011). Changing incentives to publish. Science, 333(6043), 702–703. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1197286.
Gingres, Y., Lariviere, V., Macaluso, B., & Robitaille, J. P. (2008). The effects of aging on researchers’ publication and citation patterns. PLoS ONE, 3(12), e4048. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0004048.
Heller, S. B. (2014). Summer jobs reduce violence among disadvantaged youth. Science, 346(6124), 1219–1223. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1257809.
Hirsch, J. E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102(46), 16569–16572. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0507655102.
King, D. A. (2004). The scientific impact of nations. Nature, 430(6997), 311–316. https://doi.org/10.1038/430311a.
Kiser, G. L. (2018). No more first authors, no more last authors if we really want transdisciplinary research, we must ditch the ordered listing of authors that stalls collaborative science, says. Nature, 561(7724), 435. https://doi.org/10.1038/dr41586-018-06779-2.
Knight, J. T. (2000). How many neurosurgeons does it take to write a research article? Authorship proliferation in neurosurgical research. Neurosurgery, 47(2), 435–440. https://doi.org/10.1097/00006123-200008000-00032.
Lariviere, V. (2012). On the shoulders of students? The contribution of PhD students to the advancement of knowledge. Scientometrics, 90(2), 463–481. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0495-6.
Lariviere, V., & Costas, R. (2016). How many is too many? On the relationship between research productivity and impact. PLoS ONE, 11(9), e0162709. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0162709.
Petersen, A. M., Fortunato, S., Pan, R. K., Kaski, K., Penner, O., Rungi, A., et al. (2014). Reputation and impact in academic careers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(43), 15316–15321. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1323111111.
Sandstrom, U., & van den Besselaar, P. (2016). Quantity and/or quality? The importance of publishing many papers. PLoS ONE, 11(11), e0166149. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0166149.
Schulman, E., French, J. C., Powell, A. L., Eichhorn, G., Kurtz, M. J., & Murray, S. S. (1997). Trends in astronomical publication between 1975 and 1996. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 109(741), 1278–1284. https://doi.org/10.1086/134008.
Tahamtan, I., Afshar, A. S., & Ahamdzadeh, K. (2016). Factors affecting number of citations: A comprehensive review of the literature. Scientometrics, 107(3), 1195–1225. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1889-2.
Thelwall, M., & Sud, P. (2016). National, disciplinary and temporal variations in the extent to which articles with more authors have more impact: Evidence from a geometric field normalised citation indicator. Journal of Informetrics, 10(1), 48–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2015.11.007.
van den Besselaar, P., Heyman, U., & Sandstrom, U. (2017). Perverse effects of output-based research funding? Butler’s Australian case revisited. Journal of Informetrics, 11(2), 905–918. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2017.05.016.
van Leeuwen, T. N., Visser, M. S., Moed, H. F., Nederhof, T. J., & van Raan, A. F. J. (2003). Holy Grail of science policy: Exploring and combining bibliometric tools in search of scientific excellence. Scientometrics, 57(2), 257–280.
van Noorden, R. (2017). The science that’s never been cited. Nature, 552, 162–164. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-017-08404-0.
Waltman, L., & van Eck, N. J. (2016). The inconsistency of h-index. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(2), 406–415. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21678.
Weeks, W. B., Wallace, A. E., & Kimberly, B. C. S. (2004). Changes in authorship patterns in prestigious US medical journals. Social Sciences and Medicine, 59(9), 1949–1954. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2004.02.029.
Wuchty, S., Jones, B. F., & Uzzi, B. (2007). The increasing dominance of teams in production of knowledge. Science, 316(5827), 1036–1039. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1136099.
Acknowledgements
I thank Jakub Zelený and other attendees of Café V Jirchářích for fruitful discussion inspiring me to write this paper, further I’m grateful to the anonymous reviewer for insightful comments and suggestions. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic within the National Sustainability Programme I (NPU I), Grant No. LO1415.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Emmer, A. The careers behind and the impact of solo author articles in Nature and Science. Scientometrics 120, 825–840 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03145-5
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03145-5