Abstract

There is no doubt that collaboration is a common phenomenon in research. This paper examined the collaborative strength and patterns of authorship among agricultural engineers in Nigeria, using the Nigerian Institution of Agricultural Engineers (NIAE) proceedings between 2000 and 2010 with the exclusion of 2008 data, covering a period of 10 years. The results of the data were analysed based on the number of articles published per year, pattern of authorship featured in the proceedings, and the collaborative degree and strength of authors. There are a total number of 589 articles published by 1315 authors in the years under study. Out of the 589 articles, 421 (71.5%) are joint works while only 168 (28.5%) are single authored works. The degree of author’s collaboration was also calculated to be 0.715, while the mean numbers of single authored and joint authored articles are 16.8 and 42.1 respectively. In this research, the average numbers of author per paper are between 1.9 and 2.7. The author’s productivity revealed that two authors ranked first with 14 published articles credited to each of them while many other authors also ranked high differently.

Key words: Collaboration, strength, pattern, authorship, proceedings, Nigerian Institution of Agricultural Engineers (NIAE).