Teaming up or writing alone - authorship strategies in leading Polish economic journals

The returns to scientific collaboration have been widely acknowledged. The general trend observed in top scientific journals is an increase in collaborative activities both between researchers and between institutions, especially with regard to international co-authorship. Not only there is a growing number of papers written in co-authorship, but also there is an increase in the number of co-authors. In this paper, we investigate whether similar tendencies have emerged in the scientific community of economists in Poland. Using social network analysis, we focus on collaboration between researchers publishing in five leading Polish economic journals. We find that both the number of articles written in collaboration and average number of authors per article are steadily increasing. Yet, compared to what we observe in western economic journals, the scale of collaboration is modest. Furthermore, the increase in collaborative activity which we observe is not followed by a rise in collaboration with foreign co-authors.