  In this study, I analyze the DBLP bibliographic database to study role of
single author publications in the computer science literature between 1940 and
2019. I examine the demographics and reception by computing the population
fraction, citation statistics, and PageRank scores of single author
publications over the years. Both the population fraction and reception have
been continuously declining since the 1940s. The overall decaying trend of
single author publications is qualitatively consistent with those observed in
other scientific disciplines, though the diminution is taking place several
decades later than those in the natural sciences. Additionally, I analyze the
scope and volume of single author publications, using page length and reference
count as first-order approximations of the scope of publications. Although both
metrics on average show positive correlations with citation count, single
author papers show no significant difference in page or reference counts
compared to the rest of the publications, suggesting that there exist other
factors that impact the citations of single author publications.
