Collective authorship in Ukrainian science: marginal effect or new phenomenon?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how large collaborative publications in Ukrainian science influence scientometric indicators, revealing that despite their small share, they have significant effects that challenge traditional research assessment methods.

Contribution

It introduces an analysis of collective authorship's impact on scientometric indicators in Ukraine, highlighting the need to revise evaluation approaches to account for this phenomenon.

Findings

Collective authorship publications are a small but impactful part of Ukrainian scientific output.

Their presence significantly affects scientometric indicators used for research assessment.

Traditional quantitative metrics need adjustment to properly evaluate collective authorship contributions.

Abstract

One of the features of modern science is the formation of stable large collaborations of researchers working together within the projects that require the concentration of huge financial and human resources. Results of such common work are published in scientific papers by large co-authorship teams that include sometimes thousands of names. The goal of this work is to study the influence of such publications on the values of scientometric indicators calculated for individuals, research groups and science of Ukraine in general. Bibliometric data related to Ukraine, some academic institutions and selected individual researchers were collected from Scopus database and used for our study. It is demonstrated that while the relative share of publications by collective authors is comparatively small, their presence in a general pool can lead to statistically significant effects. The obtained results clearly show that traditional quantitative approaches for research assessment should be changed in order to take into account this phenomenon. Keywords: collective authorship, scientometrics, group science, Ukraine.