Fairer citation-based metrics

TL;DR

This paper proposes a simple modification to citation-based metrics that fairly distributes citation credit among authors based on their contributions, aiming to improve fairness and reduce honorary authorship effects.

Contribution

It introduces a straightforward method to adjust existing citation indices by allocating citations proportionally to authors' contributions, enhancing fairness.

Findings

The modified metric better reflects individual contributions.

It partially normalizes for honorary authorship.

The approach can be applied to any citation count-based index.

Abstract

I describe a simple modification which can be applied to any citation count-based index (e.g. Hirsch's h-index) quantifying a researcher's publication output. The key idea behind the proposed approach is that the merit for the citations of a paper should be distributed amongst its authors according to their relative contributions. In addition to producing inherently fairer metrics I show that the proposed modification has the potential to partially normalize for the unfair effects of honorary authorship and thus discourage this practice.