Forty years of invasion research: more papers, more collaboration…bigger impact?

Abstract

Scientific research has become increasingly collaborative. We systematically reviewed invasion science literature published between 1980 and 2020 and catalogued in Clarivate Analytics Web of Science to examine patterns of authorship and the relationship between co-authorship and annual citation rates. This study analysed 27,234 publications across 1,218 journals and demonstrated that, as the number of publications in invasion science has exponentially increased, the number of authors publishing per year and the average number of authors per paper have also increased. The rising number of authors per paper coincides with a marked decline of single-authored publications; approximately 92% of publications in this dataset were multi-authored, with single-authored papers comprising less than 4% of all papers published in 2020. The increase in multi-authored papers is likely driven by multiple factors, including the widespread perception that collaboration increases scientific quality. The number of authors is positively correlated with perceived research impact; papers with two or more authors produce research that is more frequently cited compared to single-authored papers, and papers with five or more authors have annual citation rates almost double that of single-authored papers. The complexity, context-dependence and urgency of biological invasions contributed to the rise of the highly collaborative field of modern invasion science.