The value and credits of n-authors publications

Abstract

Collaboration among researchers is becoming increasingly common, which raises a large number of scientometrics questions for which there is not a clear and generally accepted answer. For instance, what value should be given to a two-author or threeauthor publication with respect to a single-author publication? This paper uses axiomatic analysis and proposes a practical method to compute the expected value of an n-authors publication that takes into consideration the added value induced by collaboration in contexts in which there is no prior or ex-ante information about the publication's potential merits or scientific impact. The only information required is the number of authors. We compared the obtained theoretical values with the empirical values based on a large dataset from the Web of Science database. We found that the theoretical values are very close to the empirical values for some disciplines, but not for all. This observation provides support in favor of the method proposed in this paper. We expect that our findings can help researchers and decisionmakers to choose more effective and fair counting methods that take into account the benefits of collaboration.

On the disruptive power of small-teams research

“…B 2 vpnq{Bn 2 ď 0 (Figure 3 provides an illustration). The concavity of vpnq captures the fact that increasing the number of co-authors may increase the expected value of a research project, but in a decreasing way (Bornmann and Osório, 2019). In other words, each new co-author adds less value to the project than the previous one, and so on, i.e.…”

Arbitrage opportunities in publication and ghost authors

“…The notions in Osório and Bornmann (2019) are individual effort, credit, value of a collaboration, and the value when successful (published or accepted). Egghe, Rousseau, and Van Hooydonk (2000) and more recently Osório (2018) also address various credit systems.…”

“…Egghe, Rousseau, and Van Hooydonk (2000) and more recently Osório (2018) also address various credit systems. I use the notation from Osório (2018), since Osório and Bornmann (2019) assume equal credit to all authors on an article.…”

Alphabetic order of authors in scholarly publications: a bibliometric study for 27 scientific fields

“…It should be noted that there are some proposals to assign relative values to the co-authors of a scientific publication according to the relative positions of each one (Trueba and Guerrero 2004;Hagen 2014;Vavryčuk 2018;Bornmann and Osório 2019). For instance, the harmonic authorship credit method uses the following formula to distribute the one-unit point among the N co-authors of a scientific paper:…”