United we stand, divided we fall. A co-authorship analysis of management scholars in Italy

Framing of the research. Collaborations and co-authorships are more and more typical in scientific research. Scientific collaboration has several advantages with regard to productivity, but it also has drawbacks. Purpose of the paper. In this paper, we analysed the Italian community of management scholars with the aim of investigating their areas of interest, main research themes and publishing journals. Secondly, we carried out a co-authorship analysis to investigate the evolution of their publishing behaviours and co-authorship dynamics. Methodology. A Scopus search was performed on the 649 Italian management scholars identified for 2019 to collect their Scopus IDs, with each ID uniquely identifying a scholar. A total of 550 Scopus IDs were collected, representing 84.7% of the 649 scholars. We then downloaded all 5,294 publications from these scholars listed in Scopus for the period 2000-2019. Social network analysis was then applied to co-authorship publication data to analyse co-authorship dynamics and publication behaviour in four time windows. Various co-authorship behaviours were analysed via ego-networks. Results. Italian management scholars increased their production in either quantity or quality from various perspectives during the period 2000-2019. However, co-authorship dynamics increased greatly during this period, underlining new publishing behaviours (at different job levels). Research limitations. The analysis is limited to the community of management scholars and contributions found in the Scopus database and does not include books and Italian articles. Managerial implications. The practice of co-authorship among management scholars may foster improvements in the quality and quantity of scientific research. However, co-authorship also has drawbacks and can lead to bias in research evaluations. Originality of the paper. The study represents the first long-term analysis of publication production on the Italian management scholars and on their co-authorship behaviour.