Patterns of authors contribution in scientific manuscripts

Abstract

Science is becoming increasingly more interdisciplinary, giving rise to more diversity in the areas of expertise within research labs and groups. This also have brought changes to the role researchers in scientific works. As a consequence, multi-authored scientific papers have now became a norm for high quality research. Unfortunately, such a phenomenon induces bias to existing metrics employed to evaluate the productivity and success of researchers. While some metrics were adapted to account for the rank of authors in a paper, many journals are now requiring a description of the specific roles of each author in a publication. Surprisingly, the investigation of the relationship between the rank of authors and their contributions has been limited to a few studies. By analyzing such kind of data, here we show, quantitatively, that the regularity in the authorship contributions decreases with the number of authors in a paper. Furthermore, we found that the rank of authors and their roles in papers follows three general patterns according to the nature of their contributions, such as writing, data analysis, and the conduction of experiments. This was accomplished by collecting and analyzing the data retrieved from PLoS ONE and by devising an entropy-based measurement to quantify the effective number of authors in a paper according to their contributions. The analysis of such patterns confirms that some aspects of the author ranking are in accordance with the expected convention, such as the fact that the first and last authors are more likely to contribute more in a scientific work. Conversely, such analysis also revealed that authors in the intermediary positions of the rank contribute more in certain specific roles, such as the task of collecting data. This indicates that the an unbiased evaluation of researchers must take into account the distinct types of scientific contributions

A complex network approach to political analysis: Application to the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies

“…The true diversity has been employed in other contexts to measure the effective number of species [27]. In network theory, the accessibility of nodes in complex networks is measured in terms of the true diversity and quantify the effective number of neighbors [28][29][30][31][32]. Because we are measuring the diversity of clusters size, hereafter we refer to the true diversity as the effective number of political parties and communities.…”

Skill ranking of researchers via hypergraph

“…PLOS ONE journal is an open-access journal, so we can extract information from their website by parsing their HTML pages of each paper with Python. The contribution information of this journal has been used to analyze the authors' contribution pattern recently (Corrêa Jr. et al, 2017;Sauermann & Haeussler, 2017). The details of our dataset are shown in Table 1.…”

“…They proposed a complex formula based on the similarity between scholars and their possessed skills to calculate the skillfulness level. Many works used authors' contribution information to measure their impact and analyzed collaboration patterns of authors (Persson, 2017;Paul-Hus et al, 2017;Rahman et al, 2017;Corrêa Jr. et al, 2017;Biswal, 2013). The contribution information can also be used in credit allocation and ranking authors (Sekercioglu, 2008;Dance, 2012).…”

Predicting the number of coauthors for researchers: A learning model

“…Coauthorship has attracted much attention, with analyses of perspectives ranging from contribution [2,3], population [4], discipline [5][6][7], country [8,9], and multination [10][11][12][13], to the connection with arXiv:2003.09315v1 [cs.DL] 20 Mar 2020 citations [14,15]. The emerging field known as team science draws on diverse disciplinary perspectives to understand the processes and outcomes of scientific collaboration.…”

“…When p > 0.05, the KS test cannot reject the null hypothesis that the two distributions are the same. number of coauthors, which enables our model to directly predict the number of coauthors generated by an inhomogeneous Poisson process.The model provides a platform to utilize multiple factors by substituting them in the right side of Eqs (2,4,6)…”