# A measure of authorship by publications

## TL;DR

This paper advocates for an ethical, egalitarian approach to measuring individual research contributions by equally dividing credit for co-authored publications, addressing issues in existing indices.

## Contribution

It demonstrates that the egalitarian E-index uniquely satisfies ethical principles like identity independence and performance invariance for quantifying authorship.

## Key findings

- The E-index is the only method satisfying key ethical criteria.
- Equal division of credit aligns with ethical considerations in authorship.
- The approach improves fairness in measuring research contributions.

## Abstract

Measuring publication success of a researcher is a complicated task as publications are often co-authored by multiple authors, and so, require comparison of solo publications with joint publications. In this paper, like \cite{price1981multiple}, we argue for an egalitarian perspective in accomplishing this task. More specifically, we justify the need for an ethical perspective in quantifying academic author by identifying certain ethical difficulties of some popular contemporary indices used for this purpose. And then we show that for any given dataset of research papers, the unique method satisfying the ethical notions of {\it identity independence} and performance invariance must be the egaliatarian E-index proposed by \cite{bps} and \cite{price1981multiple}. In our setting, this egalitarian method divides authorship of joint projects equally among authors and sums across all publications of each author.