Publication Performance and Number of Authors – Evidence for World Top Economists

Crespo, Nuno and Simoes, Nadia (2019): Publication Performance and Number of Authors – Evidence for World Top Economists.

Abstract

In social sciences the measurement of performance is usually done giving the full credit of each paper to all its authors. Aiming to analyze the impact of the number of authors on the performance results, we propose an adjustment to the h-index that is flexible enough to allow the consideration of distinct co-authorship weighting schemes. We then evaluate the publication performance of the members of the departments of economics of the top 10 world universities (472 authors; 15,243 papers). Our results show that the number of authors per paper is rapidly increasing and that this dimension measurably affects the final ranking of authors even in a scientific area in which the average number of authors is lower than in physical and life sciences.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: publication performance, h-index, authors, credit.
• Subjects: A - General Economics and Teaching > A1 - General Economics > A10 - General; A - General Economics and Teaching > A1 - General Economics > A14 - Sociology of Economics; C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C4 - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics > C43 - Index Numbers and Aggregation; I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I2 - Education and Research Institutions > I23 - Higher Education ; Research Institutions

References

Abbas, A. (2011). ‘Weighted indices for evaluating the quality of research with multiple authorship’, Scientometrics, 88, pp. 107-131.

Cole, J. and Cole, S. (1973). ‘Social stratification in science’, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Crispo, E. (2015). ‘A new index to use in conjunction with the h index to account for an author’s relative contribution to publications with high impact’, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66, pp. 2381-2383.

Dorta-González, P. and Dorta-González, M. (2011). ‘Central indexes to the citation distribution: A complement to the h-index’, Scientometrics, 88, pp. 729-745.

Egghe, L. (2008). ‘Mathematical theory of the h‐ and g‐index in case of fractional counting of authorship’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59, pp. 1608-1616.

Fang, H. (2018). ‘Normalized paper credit assignment: A solution for the ethical dilemma induced by multiple important authors’, Science and Engineering Ethics, 24, pp. 1589-1601.

Frandsen, T. and Nicolaisen, J. (2010). ‘What is in a name? Credit assignment practices in different disciplines’, Journal of Informetrics, 4, pp. 608-617.

Gao, C., Wang, Z., Li, X., Zhang, Z., and Zeng, W. (2016). ‘PR-index: using the h-index and PageRank for determining true impact’, PloS One, 11, pp. e0161755.

Hamermesh, D. (2018). ‘Citations in economics: measurement, uses, and impacts’, Journal of Economic Literature, 56, pp. 115-156.

Henriksen, D. (2016). ‘The rise in co-authorship in the social sciences (1980–2013)’, Scientometrics, 107, pp. 455-476.

Henriksen, D. (2018). ‘What factors are associated with increasing co-authorship in the social sciences? A case study of Danish Economics and Political Science’, Scientometrics, 114(3), pp.1395-1421.

Hirsch, J. (2019). ‘hα: An index to quantify an individual’s scientific leadership’, Scientometrics, forthcoming. Kadel, A. and Walter, A. (2015). ‘Do scholars in Economics and Finance react to alphabetical discrimination?’, Finance Research Letters, 14, pp. 64-68.

Larivière, V., Gingras, Y., Sugimoto, C. and Tsou, A. (2015). ‘Team size matters: Collaboration and scientific impact since 1900’, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66, pp. 1323-1332.

Leahey, E. (2016). ‘From sole investigator to team scientist: Trends in the practice and study of research collaboration’, Annual Review of Sociology, 42, pp. 81-100.

Osório, A. (2018). ‘On the impossibility of a perfect counting method to allocate the credits of multi-authored publications’, Scientometrics, 116, pp. 2161-2173.

Ossenblok, T., Verleysen, F., and Engels, T. (2014). ‘Coauthorship of journal articles and book chapters in the social sciences and humanities (2000–2010)’, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65, pp. 882-897.

Todeschini, R. and Baccini, A. (2016). ‘Handbook of bibliometric indicators: quantitative tools for studying and evaluating research’, John Wiley & Sons, Weinheim.

Vavryčuk, V. (2018). ‘Fair ranking of researchers and research teams’, PloS One, 13, e0195509.

Wan, J., Hua, P., and Rousseau, R. (2007). ‘The pure h-index: calculating an author’s h-index by taking co-authors into account’, COLLNET Journal of Scientometrics and Information Management, 1, pp. 1-5.

Wuchty, S., Jones, B., and Uzzi, B. (2007). ‘The increasing dominance of teams in production of knowledge’, Science, 316, pp. 1036-1039.