Trends in Equal-Contribution Authorship: A Large-Scale Bibliometric Analysis of Biomedical Literature

TL;DR

This large-scale bibliometric study analyzes the increasing trend of equal-contribution authorship in biomedical literature from 2010 to 2024, highlighting geographic, journal, and positional patterns.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of global and journal-level trends in equal-contribution authorship over a 14-year period.

Findings

Sharp increase in equal-contribution authorship after 2017

China leads in fractionalized contributions with 40.8%

Equal-contribution is mostly concentrated near the first-author position

Abstract

Equal-contribution authorship, in which two or more authors are designated as having contributed equally, is increasingly common in scientific publishing. Using approximately 480,000 tagged records from PubMed and PMC (2010-2024), we examine temporal trends, journal-level patterns, geographic distributions, and byline positions of equal-contributing authors. Results show a sharp rise after 2017, with both high-output mega-journals and smaller, discipline-specific journals contributing to the growth. Journal-level analysis indicates a median increase in the share of tagged articles from about 19% in 2015 to over 30% in 2024, with some journals exceeding 50%. Geographically, China accounts for the largest share (40.8% of fractionalized contributions), followed by the United States (15.2%) and Germany (5.2%). Normalizing to 2015 baselines, China shows a 13.1x; increase by 2024, while even the slowest-growing countries more than tripled their levels. Analysis of normalized byline positions shows that equal-contribution designations are concentrated near the first-author position, with fewer cases in middle or last positions. These findings document a broad shift toward shared first-author credit across journal sizes and regions within the biomedical literature and suggest that journals and evaluators may need to rely more on transparent contributorship information and to monitor the use of such labels over time.