A scientometrics law about co-authors and their ranking: the co-author core

Abstract

Dated: today) Rather than "measuring" a scientist impact through the number of citations which his/her published work can have generated, isn't it more appropriate to consider his/her value through his/her scientific network performance illustrated by his/her co-author role, thus focussing on his/her joint publications, -and their impact through citations? Whence, on one hand, this paper very briefly examines bibliometric laws, like the h-index and subsequent debate about co-authorship effects, but on the other hand, proposes a measure of collaborative work through a new index. Based on data about the publication output of a specific research group, a new bibliometric law is found.Let a co-author C have written J (joint) publications with one or several colleagues. Rank all the co-authors of that individual according to their number of joint publications, giving a rank r to each co-author, starting with r = 1 for the most prolific. It is empirically found that a very simple relationship holds between the number of joint publications J by coauthors and their rank of importance, i.e. J ∝ 1/r. Thereafter, in the same spirit as for the Hirsch core, one can define a "co-author core", and introduce indices operating on an author. It is emphasized that the new index has a quite different (philosophical) perspective that the h-index. In the present case, one focusses on "relevant" persons rather than on "relevant" publications.Although the numerical discussion is based on one case, there is little doubt that the law can be verified in many other situations. Therefore, variants and generalizations could be later produced in order to quantify co-author roles, in a temporary or long lasting stable team(s), and lead to criteria about funding, career measurements or even induce career strategies.

Fair ranking of researchers and research teams

“…Fig 6 (lower panel) shows a comparison of the differences between the standard and weighted ranking (in grey colour) and the differences between the weighted and fractional ranking (in red colour). Small differences between the fractional and weighted schemes confirm that: (1) applying even the simple fractional scheme leads to a significant improvement of the h -index, and (2) developing more complicated authorship-weighted schemes [8,23,30,39–40,44–45] than those analysed here is not very reasonable because the corrections will be minor.…”

Inciting the metric oriented humanist: Teaching bibliometrics in a faculty of humanities

“…This does not mean that all humanities scholars are uninterested in mathematics (e.g., some philosophers are well--versed in mathematical logic), but it is fair to say that there are general differences in orientation between the scientist and the humanist. For instance, when scientists disagree with metric approaches to evaluation, they are still more likely than a humanist to suggest new mathematical indicators [37] or participate in their improvements [4]. When introducing indicators to students of the humanities, it is therefore important to do so in a language that they can understand.…”

It is not What but Who you Know

“…The authors of [1], for instance, stated that an author's scientific relevance should not be based on the number of citations of her/his papers, but is about how much co-workers she/he has been able to connect to in order to produce (joint) scientific publications. In [18] the authors started from the same motivation and proposed the independence indicator made up of three different dimensions of independence: the ability of developing own co-author networks, novel thematic directions, and strong quality of the research focus.…”