Co‐Authorship in Applied Linguistics Research: Patterns and Trends, 1991–2023

Abstract It has been 18 years since Greene's featured article in Nature , T he demise of the lone author . In that time, there have been enormous shifts in how educational research has been conducted, with a move towards greater teamworking, anecdotally evident from author bylines in published documents. This bibliometric study investigates patterns of co‐authorship (as a form of research collaboration) in applied linguistics across academic journals, countries of affiliated authors, research approaches (quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods and secondary research) and research topics. The analysis included 33,323 articles from 42 applied linguistics journals spanning 1991 to 2023. The findings show a significant shift away from single‐authored works towards increased forms of co‐authorship. While single‐authored publications still contribute prominently, co‐authored works have become more prevalent and, by some citation measures, more impactful. However, such findings are not uniform across countries of author‐affiliated institutions, research approaches, or topics. Co‐authorship was more heavily utilised in particular topics (e.g., psycholinguistics, language testing and assessment), related journals (e.g., Applied Psycholinguistics and Bilingualism: Language and Cognition ) and methodological approaches (quantitative studies and systematic reviews). The findings indicate implications for planning and conducting research in the discipline moving forward.