Bilateral Co-authorship Indicators Based on Fractional Counting

Abstract

PurposeIn this contribution we provide two new co-authorship indicators based on fractional counting.Design/methodology/approachBased on the idea of fractional counting we reflect on what should be an acceptable indicator for co-authorship between two entities. From this reflection we propose an indicator, the co-authorship score, denoted as cs, using the harmonic mean. Dividing this new indicator by the classical co-authorship indicator based on full counting, leads to a co-authorship intensity indicator.FindingsWe show that the indicators we propose have many necessary or at least highly desirable properties for a proper cs-score. It is pointed out that the two new indicators can be used for countries, but also for institutions and other pairs of entities. A small example shows the feasibility of the co-authorship score and the co-authorship intensity indicator.Research limitationsThe indicators are not yet tested in real cases.Practical implicationsAs the notions of co-authorship and collaboration have many aspects, we think that our contribution may help policy management to take yet another aspect into account as part of a multi-faceted description of research outcomes.Originality/valueThe indicators we propose cover yet another aspect of co-authorship.

Using the weighted Lorenz curve to represent balance in collaborations: the BIC indicator

“…This is the number of collaboration links of each other country with country L . Although we prefer fractional counting [and there exist several options here, see e.g., (Rousseau & Zhang, 2021 )], at this point it does not matter if one counts the number of publications using whole counting or using fractional counting. For simplicity, we formulate our theory in terms of whole counting.…”