How lonely or influential is the Lone Wolf? An analysis of individual scholars’ solo-authorship dynamics

Collaboration has become a defining feature of modern science. Nevertheless, solo-authorship has not disappeared entirely. In this study, we investigate solo-authorship dynamics at the individual scholar level, a perspective often overlooked in favor of publication-level analyses, focusing on the propensity of scholars to solo-publish over their careers and this propensity’s potential relation to their academic influence. Using a dataset of 7238 scholars from Biology, Computer Science, Psychology, and Philosophy, we analyze the temporal solo-authorship patterns through heatmap analysis, time series clustering, and statistical testing. By formally defining and analyzing the notion of the academic “Lone Wolf”—a scholar who persistently solo-publishes at a high rate—we show that a global definition of a Lone Wolf may seem unreasonable. Nevertheless, we identify three characteristic solo-authorship trajectories across the four disciplines that share several commonalities and highly their differences. Our findings do not suggest any significant relation between scholars’ solo- authorship dynamics and their influence metrics.