The importance of co - authorship and disciplined research

This study reviewed articles in a Pacific Islands Educational Journal from 1978 to 2005 in order to analyse the types of authorship and types of papers published. It was specifically interested in looking at the prevalence of co-authorship and in identifying the style of authorship and the research approaches taken. It was found that of the 362 authors, most of them are single authors at 75.7 and 24.3% were involved in co-authorship. In terms of the types of papers, 72.7% wrote essay or opinion papers, 17.7% wrote articles based on quantitative approaches, 7.7% wrote qualitative articles and 2.2% wrote articles using mixed method approaches. These findings have important implications for research and publication in higher education and research in and on the Pacific Islands, in terms of encouraging collaborative research among researchers and being out in the field to collect data to enable better evidence for education