Coauthorship in academic journals: Implications for international collaboration and alliances

Abstract

Based on the knowledge‐based resource theory of alliance, we analyze coauthorship collaboration. We find that (1) collaboration increases the impact of published articles; (2) articles with nonalphabetical author listing are associated with fewer citations; and (3) barriers to transferring knowledge lowers an article's impact, especially if authors do not take ownership over the article. Coauthors who do not act as if they were senior authors undermine coauthorship collaboration, resulting in lower citations on the article. Our results suggest that articles with alphabetical author listing receive more citations, questioning the norm in journals of some disciplines that advocate nonalphabetical author listing.

What Constitutes Authorship in the Social Sciences?

“…Yet these approaches relied on estimates as one could not know the actual degree to which each author engaged in the research process (Lindsey, 1980). In addition, these techniques did not seem reasonable for fields like Accounting or Economics in which authors are not ranked by contribution but alphabetically (Engers et al, 1999;Chan et al, 2009). To better assess researchers' impact and productivity, various editorials and articles have followed up on the discussions of author order and how to distribute publication and citation counts among co-authors (e.g., Floyd et al, 1994;Endersby, 1996;Macfarlane, 2017;Sauermann and Haeussler, 2017;Balkin et al, 2018).…”