On the extinction of the single‐authored paper: The causes and consequences of increasingly collaborative applied ecological research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1963, Price analysed authorship patterns in chemical science and identified that “…the proportion of multi‐author papers has accelerated steadily and powerfully, and it is now so large that if it continues at the present rate, by 1980 the single‐author paper will be extinct” (Price, 1963). An analysis of all research papers published in Journal of Applied Ecology since 1966 shows that the trends identified by Price also apply to our field: an exponential increase in the mean number of authors per published article has been mirrored by a sharp decline in the proportion of single‐authored papers (Figure 1). From over 60% of all publications in the 1960s, single‐author papers now make up less than 4% (averaged over the past 10 years). Although the single‐author paper has hung on well beyond 1980 in Journal of Applied Ecology, their extinction now appears imminent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.036 | 0.124 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".