Collaborative authorship in the journal literature: Perspectives for academic librarians who wish to publish

Abstract

Academic librarians, particularly college librarians, may increase their contributions to the professional literature through collaborative authorship. For example, university librarians, who published 69 percent of the articles in College & Research Libraries and the Journal of Academic Librarianship between 1986 and 1996, contributed almost 90 percent of the coauthored research in those core journals. This study examines the increase in collaboration in the literature of academic librarianship and in other disciplines, explores the relationship between collaboration and article quality as well as author productivity, compares collaborative patterns of college and university librarians, and considers factors that lead to successful collaboration.