The value and credits of n-authors publications

TL;DR

This paper proposes a practical axiomatic method to evaluate the value of multi-author publications, considering collaboration benefits, and compares theoretical estimates with empirical data across disciplines.

Contribution

It introduces a novel axiomatic approach to quantify the value of n-authors publications based solely on the number of authors, validated against real-world data.

Findings

Theoretical values closely match empirical data in some disciplines.

The method provides a fairer way to assess collaborative research contributions.

Discipline-specific differences affect the accuracy of the proposed valuation.

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 three-author 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 decision-makers to choose more effective and fair counting methods that take into account the benefits of collaboration.