Do Academics Actually Collaborate in the Study of Interdisciplinary Phenomena? A Look at Half a Century of Research on Mergers and Acquisitions

The role of scientific collaboration in academic research has rocketed across the natural and social sciences. While the causes, consequences, and social interaction patterns of scientific collaboration have been well-established, extant empirical work focuses on entire disciplines. In this paper, we study patterns of interdisciplinary scientific collaboration using the example of research on mergers and acquisitions (M&A), a phenomenon which calls for input from numerous disciplines. We base our findings on a social network analysis of co-authorship practices in 687 co-authored papers written by 1,158 authors, published in 30 leading journals and a book series in the 1951–2014 period. We find that scientific collaboration has increased in the M&A scholarly community since the 1990s, and that one third of co-authorships are interdisciplinary. Collaboration is however not equally spread, but led by a minority of active scholars and certain disciplines. Recently, sub-groups of authors have become mutually connected, pointing towards the emergence of an interdisciplinary meta-level community. Our findings contribute to appreciating interdisciplinary collaboration practices in academic research and document the evolution of M&A research.