Étiquette : authorship

Publié le

Authorship Distribution and Collaboration in LIS Open Access Journals: A Scopus based analysis during 2001 to 2015

Authors : Barik Nilaranjan, Jena Puspanjali

The present study is a bibliometric analysis of some selected open access Library and Information Science (LIS) journals indexed in Scopus database during the period 2001 to 2015. The study has covered 10 LIS open access journals with 5208 publications to establish an idea about the pattern of authorship, research collaboration, collaboration index, degree of collaboration, collaboration coefficient, author’s productivity, ranking of prolific authors etc. of said journals.

Lotkas’s inverse square law has been applied to know the scientific productivity of authors. Results show that, the covered LIS open access journals are dominant with single authorship pattern.

The value of Collaborative Index (0.73), Degree of Collaboration (0.72), and Collaboration Coefficient (0.29) do not show the trend of collaboration. Lotka’s law of author’s productivity is fitting to the present data set.

The country wise distribution of authorship based on the country of origin of the corresponding author shows that 83 countries across the Globe are active in publication of their research in LIS open access journals. United States of America (USA) is the leader country producing of 2822 (54.19%) authors alone.

URL : https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/2033/

Publié le

How to counter undeserving authorship

Authors: Stefan Eriksson, Tove Godskesen, Lars Andersson, Gert Helgesson

The average number of authors listed on contributions to scientific journals has increased considerably over time. While this may be accounted for by the increased complexity of much research and a corresponding need for extended collaboration, several studies suggest that the prevalence of non-deserving authors on research papers is alarming.

In this paper a combined qualitative and quantitative approach is suggested to reduce the number of undeserving authors on academic papers: 1) ask scholars who apply for positions to explain the basics of a random selection of their co-authored papers, and 2) in bibliometric measurements, divide publications and citations by the number of authors.

URL : How to counter undeserving authorship

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.395

Publié le

The Social Structure of Consensus in Scientific Review

Authors : Misha Teplitskiy, Daniel Acuna, Aida Elamrani-Raoult, Konrad Kording, James Evans

Personal connections between creators and evaluators of scientific works are ubiquitous, and the possibility of bias ever-present. Although connections have been shown to bias prospective judgments of (uncertain) future performance, it is unknown whether such biases occur in the much more concrete task of assessing the scientific validity of already completed work, and if so, why.

This study presents evidence that personal connections between authors and reviewers of neuroscience manuscripts are associated with biased judgments and explores the mechanisms driving the effect.

Using reviews from 7,981 neuroscience manuscripts submitted to the journal PLOS ONE, which instructs reviewers to evaluate manuscripts only on scientific validity, we find that reviewers favored authors close in the co-authorship network by ~0.11 points on a 1.0 – 4.0 scale for each step of proximity.

PLOS ONE’s validity-focused review and the substantial amount of favoritism shown by distant vs. very distant reviewers, both of whom should have little to gain from nepotism, point to the central role of substantive disagreements between scientists in different “schools of thought.”

The results suggest that removing bias from peer review cannot be accomplished simply by recusing the closely-connected reviewers, and highlight the value of recruiting reviewers embedded in diverse professional networks.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.01270

Publié le

The rise of the middle author: Investigating collaboration and division of labor in biomedical research using partial alphabetical authorship

Authors : Philippe Mongeon, Elise Smith, Bruno Joyal, Vincent Larivière

Contemporary biomedical research is performed by increasingly large teams. Consequently, an increasingly large number of individuals are being listed as authors in the bylines, which complicates the proper attribution of credit and responsibility to individual authors.

Typically, more importance is given to the first and last authors, while it is assumed that the others (the middle authors) have made smaller contributions. However, this may not properly reflect the actual division of labor because some authors other than the first and last may have made major contributions.

In practice, research teams may differentiate the main contributors from the rest by using partial alphabetical authorship (i.e., by listing middle authors alphabetically, while maintaining a contribution-based order for more substantial contributions). In this paper, we use partial alphabetical authorship to divide the authors of all biomedical articles in the Web of Science published over the 1980–2015 period in three groups: primary authors, middle authors, and supervisory authors.

We operationalize the concept of middle author as those who are listed in alphabetical order in the middle of an authors’ list. Primary and supervisory authors are those listed before and after the alphabetical sequence, respectively.

We show that alphabetical ordering of middle authors is frequent in biomedical research, and that the prevalence of this practice is positively correlated with the number of authors in the bylines. We also find that, for articles with 7 or more authors, the average proportion of primary, middle and supervisory authors is independent of the team size, more than half of the authors being middle authors.

This suggests that growth in authors lists are not due to an increase in secondary contributions (or middle authors) but, rather, in equivalent increases of all types of roles and contributions (including many primary authors and many supervisory authors).

Nevertheless, we show that the relative contribution of alphabetically ordered middle authors to the overall production of knowledge in the biomedical field has greatly increased over the last 35 years.

URL : The rise of the middle author: Investigating collaboration and division of labor in biomedical research using partial alphabetical authorship

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0184601

 

 

Publié le

Making visible the invisible through the analysis of acknowledgements in the humanities

Author : Adrian A. Diaz-Faes, Maria Bordons

Purpose

Science is subject to a normative structure that includes how the contributions and interactions between scientists are rewarded. Authorship and citations have been the key elements within the reward system of science, whereas acknowledgements, despite being a well-established element in scholarly communication, have not received the same attention.

This paper aims to put forward the bearing of acknowledgements in the humanities to bring to the foreground contributions and interactions that, otherwise, would remain invisible through traditional indicators of research performance.

Design/methodology/approach

The study provides a comprehensive framework to understanding acknowledgements as part of the reward system with a special focus on its value in the humanities as a reflection of intellectual indebtedness.

The distinctive features of research in the humanities are outlined and the role of acknowledgements as a source of contributorship information is reviewed to support these assumptions.

Findings

Peer interactive communication is the prevailing support thanked in the acknowledgements of humanities, so the notion of acknowledgements as super-citations can make special sense in this area.

Since single-authored papers still predominate as publishing pattern in this domain, the study of acknowledgements might help to understand social interactions and intellectual influences that lie behind a piece of research and are not visible through authorship.

Originality/value

Previous works have proposed and explored the prevailing acknowledgement types by domain.

This paper focuses on the humanities to show the role of acknowledgements within the reward system and highlight publication patterns and inherent research features which make acknowledgements particularly interesting in the area as reflection of the socio-cognitive structure of research.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.06334

Publié le

Recognizing the Diversity of Contributions: A Case Study for Framing Attribution and Acknowledgement for Scientific Data

Authors : Chung-Yi Hou, Matthew Mayernik

As scientific data volumes, format types, and sources increase rapidly with the invention and improvement of scientific capabilities, the resulting datasets are becoming more complex to manage as well.

One of the significant management challenges is pulling apart the individual contributions of specific people and organizations within large, complex projects.

This is important for two aspects:1) assigning responsibility and accountability for scientific work, and 2) giving professional credit to individuals (e.g. hiring, promotion, and tenure) who work within such large projects.

This paper aims to review the extant practice of data attribution and how it may be improved. Through a case study of creating a detailed attribution record for a climate model dataset, the paper evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the current data attribution method and proposes an alternative attribution framework accordingly.

The paper concludes by demonstrating that, analogous to acknowledging the different roles and responsibilities shown in movie credits, the methodology developed in the study could be used in general to identify and map out the relationships among the organizations and individuals who had contributed to a dataset.

As a result, the framework could be applied to create data attribution for other dataset types beyond climate model datasets.

URL : Recognizing the Diversity of Contributions: A Case Study for Framing Attribution and Acknowledgement for Scientific Data

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v11i1.357

Publié le

The Authorship Dilemma: Alphabetical or Contribution?

Authors : Margareta Ackerman, Simina Brânzei

Scientific communities have adopted different conventions for ordering authors on publications.

Are these choices inconsequential, or do they have significant influence on individual authors, the quality of the projects completed, and research communities at large? What are the trade-offs of using one convention over another?

In order to investigate these questions, we formulate a basic two-player game theoretic model, which already illustrates interesting phenomena that can occur in more realistic settings.

We find that alphabetical ordering can improve research quality, while contribution-based ordering leads to a denser collaboration network and a greater number of publications.

Contrary to the assumption that free riding is a weakness of the alphabetical ordering scheme, this phenomenon can occur under any contribution scheme, and the worst case occurs under contribution-based ordering.

Finally, we show how authors working on multiple projects can cooperate to attain optimal research quality and eliminate free riding given either contribution scheme.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1208.3391