On the impossibility of a perfect counting method to allocate the credits of multi-authored publications

The problem on how to distribute the publication credits among ordered coauthors has been extensively discussed in the literature. However, there is no consensus about what is the most adequate procedure. This paper studies the properties of the existing counting methods and shows an impossibility result regarding the existence of a general counting method able to satisfy no advantageous merging and no advantageous splitting simultaneously—two properties that we consider fundamental. Our results suggest that the generalized variations of the geometric and the harmonic counting methods are the most flexible and robust in theoretical terms.

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