Of special note from The Economist report:
To investigate the matter, The Economist reviewed data on more than 34m research papers published between 1996 and 2015 in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. These were drawn from Scopus, the world’s biggest catalogue of abstracts and citations of papers, which is owned by RELX Group, a publisher and information company. Over the period in question, the average number of authors per paper grew from 3.2 to 4.4.
In other words, papers are almost universally gaining more co-authors over time!
Can we improve the tools to make online collaboration easier?
There are an increasing number of
digital tools available to researchers. These tools range from reference management and data sharing to grammar-aware content editing and dissemination. Most importantly, many of these tools are specifically designed to help researchers work together to produce collaborative articles.
Some of our favorite digital tools for online collaboration:
Benchling - for managing a life sciences lab in the cloud
Kaggle - for data science teams
PaperPile - for managing references and storing articles from the web while using Google Docs and Word
Authorea - for writing collaborative, data-rich, and dynamic research documents online
Further Reading