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This is related to advisor selection for North American universities, STEM majors.
I noticed some profs tend to have a lot of "solo" publications, meaning that he or she is the sole author of a journal/paper for over the span of quite a few years. This tends to be from earlier on during his or her career as a researcher.
Is this common in academia? What would cause this to happen (not saying that it is a bad thing) and does it hint at anything about the particular researcher?
There are a lot of reasons why a professor may publish a paper without co-authors: (1) he did the research by himself and wanted it to get all the credit for that research instead of sharing it with some co-authors that he could have invited on his paper, (2) he did not have students, (3) he does not have good social skills or his project appear uninteresting to others and thus he could not find collaborators...
In general, it is beneficial to have collaborators. They have different ideas which can improve the quality of the paper, and they can help carrying the reearch and writting and thus reduce the amount of work by the main author. Thus the main author can then do more research. Some researchers will see it as a negative point if an author has too many papers by himself and do not collaborate.
The normal number of co-authors, if any, is very specific to the different (sub-(sub-))disciplines. In my specific sub-discipline it is normal to have a number of solo publications and a number of publications with one, maybe two, co-authors. But in the same department we have people who do primarily qualitative research and they tell me that it is very unusual to have co-authors and they cannot imagine how that would work. From the outside we would both be sociologist, but even within disciplines there are big differences. In other disciplines it is normal to have 5 or more co-authors. So the number of co-authors per se does not say much without also considering the sub-sub-sub-sub-discipline that that person works in.
What a number of single-author publications means will depend entirely on what field, and as other people have noted, what sub-field you are in. In my own experience, in a field (Epidemiology) where single author papers are extremely rare, I have a modest number of them all of which fall into a single category:
"Methodological Musing"
These are small papers with a single idea, usually which can be addressed with a single illustrative example. Essentially they are "Dear Field, Stop Doing This. Love, Me."
Those papers don't need a second person. They are amusing side thoughts. Those don't necessarily reflect anything on the number of students I have, how friendly I am as a collaborator, or what stage of my career I'm in. The only thing they're possibly indicative of is that I'm interested enough in methods development that if that's not what you're interested in, we should possibly not work together. But the answers to what this means are too varied by field, sub-field, personal style and "Well, what's in those papers" for there to be a meaningful, general answer.
It means the Prof. is self-reliant. In other words, he/she doesn't need to wait for some bright students to come along to be his/her research brain/arm. The key thing to look for is the quality of his/her solo publications. Are they good? Usually, a Prof. will have lots more solo publications earlier on in his/her career; he/she doesn't have the gravitas to pull students in yet. This is especially true in the US where I believe you really need to have $ or funding before you get students. So without funding, you're a one man team.
The other side of the coin are Profs. who ride the coat tail of big Profs.
