Coherent measures of the impact of co-authors in peer review journals and in proceedings publications

TL;DR

This paper introduces empirical measures to quantify the impact of co-authors across different publication types, revealing linear relationships and power laws that suggest co-authorship is a more positive indicator of research impact than traditional metrics like the Hirsch index.

Contribution

It uncovers new empirical relationships between co-author core values and citation measures across publication types, supporting co-authorship as a valuable impact metric.

Findings

Linear relationship between coauthor core values in journals and proceedings

Power law relationship between coauthor core and number of coauthors

Co-authorship measures outperform Hirsch index in indicating research impact

Abstract

This paper focuses on the coauthor effect in different types of publications, usually not equally respected in measuring research impact. {\it A priori} unexpected relationships are found between the total coauthor core value, $m_a$, of a leading investigator (LI), and the related values for their publications in either peer review journals ($j$) or in proceedings ($p$). A surprisingly linear relationship is found: $ m_a^{(j)} + 0.4\;m_a^{(p)} = m_a^{(jp)} $. Furthermore, another relationship is found concerning the measure of the total number of citations, $A_a$, i.e. the surface of the citation size-rank histogram up to $m_a$. Another linear relationship exists : $A_a^{(j)} + 1.36\; A_a^{(p)} = A_a^{(jp)} $. These empirical findings coefficients (0.4 and 1.36) are supported by considerations based on an empirical power law found between the number of joint publications of an author and the rank of a coauthor. Moreover, a simple power law relationship is found between $m_a$ and the number ($r_M$) of coauthors of a LI: $m_a\simeq r_M^{\mu}$; the power law exponent $\mu$ depends on the type ($j$ or $p$) of publications. These simple relations, at this time limited to publications in physics, imply that coauthors are a "more positive measure" of a principal investigator role, in both types of scientific outputs, than the Hirsch index could indicate. Therefore, to scorn upon co-authors in publications, in particular in proceedings, is incorrect. On the contrary, the findings suggest an immediate test of coherence of scientific authorship in scientific policy processes.