Joint and multi-authored publication patterns in the Digital Humanities

The stereotype of the multi-authored Digital Humanities paper is well known but has not, until now, been empirically investigated. Here we present the results of a statistical analysis of collaborative publishing patterns in Computers and the Humanities (CHum) (1966–2004); Literary and Linguistic Computing (LLC) (1986–2011); and, as a control, the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (AAAG) (1966–2013) in order to take a first step towards investigating concepts of ‘collaboration’ in Digital Humanities. We demonstrate that in two core Digital Humanities journals, CHum and LLC, single-authored papers predominate. In AAAG, single-authored papers are also predominant. In regard to multi-authored papers the statistically significant increases are more wideranging in AAAG than in either LLC or CHum, with increases in all forms of multi-authorship. The author connectivity scores show that in CHum, LLC, and AAAG, there is a relatively small cohort of authors who co-publish with a wide set of other authors, and a longer tail of authors for whom co-publishing is less common. .................................................................................................................................................................................