Measuring institutional research productivity for the life sciences: the importance of accounting for the order of authors in the byline

Accurate measurement of institutional research productivity should account for the real contribution of the research staff to the output produced in collaboration with other organizations. In the framework of bibliometric measurement, this implies accounting for both the number of co-authors and each individual’s real contribution to scientific publications. Common practice in the life sciences is to indicate such contribution through the order of author names in the byline. In this work, we measure the distortion introduced to university-level bibliometric productivity rankings when the number of co-authors or their position in the byline is ignored. The field of observation consists of all Italian universities active in the life sciences (Biology and Medicine). The analysis is based on the research output of the university staff over the period 2004–2008. Based on the results, we recommend against the use of bibliometric indicators that ignore co-authorship and real contribution of each author to research outputs.

[1]  D'AngeloCiriaco Andrea,et al.  A heuristic approach to author name disambiguation in bibliometrics databases for large-scale research assessments , 2011 .

[2]  Dag W. Aksnes,et al.  Ranking national research systems by citation indicators. A comparative analysis using whole and fractionalised counting methods , 2012, J. Informetrics.

[3]  L. Egghe,et al.  Theory and practise of the g-index , 2006, Scientometrics.

[4]  Peder Olesen Larsen,et al.  Comparisons of results of publication counting using different methods , 2008, Scientometrics.

[5]  Giovanni Abramo,et al.  Assessment of sectoral aggregation distortion in research productivity measurements , 2008 .

[6]  魏屹东,et al.  Scientometrics , 2018, Encyclopedia of Big Data.

[7]  Vincenzo Carbone.  Fractional counting of authorship to quantify scientific research output , 2011, ArXiv.

[8]  M. Swiontkowski,et al.  (Mis)perceptions about authors' contributions to scientific articles based on order of authorship , 2003 .

[9]  Ronald Rousseau,et al.  The pure h-index: calculating an author’s h- index by taking co-authors into account , 2007 .

[10]  Thomas R. Scott,et al.  QUAD system offers fair shares to all authors , 2003, Nature.

[11]  J. E. Hirsch,et al.  An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output , 2005, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA.

[12]  William F. Laurance,et al.  Second thoughts on who goes where in author lists , 2006, Nature.

[13]  Mônica G. Campiteli,et al.  Is it possible to compare researchers with different scientific interests? , 2006, Scientometrics.

[14]  Leo Egghe.  Mathematical theory of the h- and g-index in case of fractional counting of authorship , 2008, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[15]  Giovanni Abramo,et al.  The importance of accounting for the number of co-authors and their order when assessing research performance at the individual level in the life sciences , 2018, J. Informetrics.

[16]  Jonas Lundberg,et al.  Lifting the crown - citation z-score , 2007, J. Informetrics.

[17]  Bing He,et al.  Mining patterns of author orders in scientific publications , 2012, J. Informetrics.