How Many People Has a Researcher Written With?
Published · paper counts are current, not as-published
Co-authorship is the easiest thing to count in a paper corpus and one of the easiest to get wrong. The average researcher here has written with 15.7 people. The median has written with 7. That gap is the whole story, and it is not about unusually prolific researchers.
The Average Is Measuring a Data Problem
This corpus scores author profiles for a specific defect: whether one name is carrying the work of several people. A profile whose papers do not cluster into one co-authorship group is flagged as probably more than one researcher. Measured on the 8,823 profiles that carry a score, 2,109 are flagged that way - and their median is 95 co-authors against 7 for everyone else.
14 times the middle value, on profiles the data itself says are suspect. That is where the average comes from. The largest single profile records 2,256 co-authors, which is not a career - it is a common name.
And a Twelfth of the Corpus Has Never Co-Authored
At the other end, 1,395 of 233,165 author records - 0.6% - appear in no co-authorship pair at all. Every paper they have in this corpus they wrote alone. Read alongside the falling share of single-author papers, that is a group getting smaller rather than a stable minority.
What This Does Not Show
- Author records are not people. That is the article's own subject, and it cuts both ways: one person publishing under two spellings is two records here, and the flag catches the opposite error rather than this one.
- The flag is computed for a minority. Only 3.8% of profiles carry a score, so the separation above is a lower bound on how much conflation is in the tail, not a measurement of all of it.
- Co-authorship within this corpus only. Collaborations that produced nothing at these 36 venues are invisible here, so every count is a floor.
- Not seniority, and not a network position. A count of distinct co-authors says nothing about who led the work.
The numbers here are read from the database when you load the page. Profiles the corpus flags are listed under the authors directory.