Effects of Publications in Proceedings on the Measure of the Core Size of Coauthors

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different publication types, such as proceedings and journal articles, influence the measurement of coauthor core size and the importance ranking of collaborators in scientific careers.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of publication types' effects on coauthor importance metrics and extends existing models to account for publication categories.

Findings

Proceedings contribute about half the core size compared to total publications.

The exponent α in the importance distribution is weakly dependent on the scientist.

Publication type marginally affects the core value m_A, with proceedings being most influential.

Abstract

Coauthors (CA) of a "lead investigator" (LI) can receive a rank (r) according to their "importance" in having published joint publications with the LI. It is commonly accepted, without any proof, that publications in peer review journals and e.g. conference proceedings do not have the same "value" in a CV. Same for papers contributed to encyclopedia and book chapters. It is here examined whether the relationship between the number (J) of publications of some scientist with her/his coauthors, ranked according to their decreasing importance, i.e. $ J \propto 1/r^{\alpha} $, as found by Ausloos, still holds if the overall publication list is broken into such specific types of publications. Several authors, with different careers, but mainly having worked in the field of statistical mechanics, are studied here to sort out answers to the questions. The exponent $\alpha$ turns out to be weakly scientist dependent, only if the maximum value of J and r is large and is $\sim +1$ then. The $m_A$ core value, i.e. the core number of CAs, for proceedings only is about half of the total one, i.e. when all publications are counted. Contributions to the numerical values from both encyclopedia and book chapters are marginal. The role of a time span on $m_A$ is also examined in two cases in relation to career activity considerations. It can considered that the findings serve as a contrasting point of view on how to quantify an individual (publication) career as recently done by Petersen et al., here emphasizing the collaboration size and evolution, rather than a citation count, moreover specifying the type of publication. Through the various $m_A$'s one can distinguish different behavior patterns of a scientist publication with CAs.