Evaluation of Scientific Disciplines in Turkey: A Citation Analysis Study - Challenges of Information Management Beyond the Cloud - page 151

disciplines. Meeting abstracts are mostly written for the field of science and
engineering. Book reviews, biographical items and art exhibit reviews are in the arts
and humanities field. The findings are important to show variety of document types
and their distribution.

3.3 Number of Authors

Co-authorship can be regarded as an indicator of team work and scientific
communication. According to our study, scholars who work in the arts and humanities
discipline prefer working alone. Maximum author count for arts and humanities
literature is 10. Social sciences and engineering resemble each other from the point of
co-authorship. Maximum author count for engineering is 101 (electrical-electronic
engineering), for social sciences 105 (psychology). The median of author number for
each publication is 2 for both disciplines. Science discipline is different from other
areas. Biology authors give preference to working together (median is 4). Maximum
author count is 105 for biology, 2010 for physics, 40 for chemistry and 10 for
mathematics. Mathematics discipline is approaching social sciences author numbers.
Information about co-authorship is shown on Fig. 2.

Fig. 2. Median number of authors for different disciplines

Findings of this study bear out earlier studies. According to a 2009 [7], single
authorship is prevalent in social sciences (78%) and arts and humanities (93%). This
study found that multiple authorship is preferred for engineering (62%) and sciences
(64%) disciplines. The findings regarding single and multiple authorships of Turkish
scholars according to disciplines is shown in Fig. 3.