Archives des mots-clés : authorship

What Motivates Authors of Scholarly Articles? The Importance of Journal Attributes and Potential Audience on Publication Choice

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Authors : Carol Tenopir, Elizabeth Dalton, Allison Fish, Lisa Christian, Misty Jones, MacKenzie Smith

In this article we examine what motivations influence academic authors in selecting a journal in which to publish.

A survey was sent to approximately 15,000 faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers at four large North American research universities with a response rate of 14.4% (n = 2021).

Respondents were asked to rate how eight different journal attributes and five different audiences influence their choice of publication output. Within the sample, the most highly rated attributes are quality and reputation of journal and fit with the scope of the journal; open access is the least important attribute. Researchers at other research-intensive institutions are considered the most important audience, while the general public is the least important.

There are significant differences across subject disciplines and position types. Our findings have implications for understanding the adoption of open access publishing models.

URL : What Motivates Authors of Scholarly Articles? The Importance of Journal Attributes and Potential Audience on Publication Choice

Alternative location : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/4/3/22

Men set their own cites high: Gender and self-citation across fields and over time

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Authors : Molly M. King, Carl T. Bergstrom, Shelley J. Correll, Jennifer Jacquet, Jevin D. West

How common is self-citation in scholarly publication and does the practice vary by gender? Using novel methods and a dataset of 1.5 million research papers in the scholarly database JSTOR published between 1779-2011, we find that nearly 10% of references are self-citations by a paper’s authors.

We further find that over the years between 1779-2011, men cite their own papers 56% more than women do. In the last two decades of our data, men self-cite 70% more than women. Women are also more than ten percentage points more likely than men to not cite their own previous work at all.

Despite increased representation of women in academia, this gender gap in self-citation rates has remained stable over the last 50 years. We break down self-citation patterns by academic field and number of authors, and comment on potential mechanisms behind these observations.

These findings have important implications for scholarly visibility and likely consequences for academic careers.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.00376

Contributorship and division of labor in knowledge production

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Scientific authorship has been increasingly complemented with contributorship statements. While such statements are said to ensure more equitable credit and responsibility attribution, they also provide an opportunity to examine the roles and functions that authors play in the construction of knowledge and the relationship between these roles and authorship order.

Drawing on a comprehensive and multidisciplinary dataset of 87,002 documents in which contributorship statements are found, this paper examines the forms that division of labor takes across disciplines, the relationships between various types of contributions, as well as the relationships between the contribution types and various indicators of authors’ seniority.

It shows that scientific work is more highly divided in medical disciplines than in mathematics, physics and disciplines of the social sciences, and that, with the exception of medicine, the writing of the paper is the task most often associated with authorship.

The results suggest a clear distinction between contributions that could be labelled as ‘technical’ and those that could be considered ‘conceptual’: While conceptual tasks are typically associated with authors with higher seniority, technical tasks are more often performed by younger scholars.

Finally, results provide evidence of a u-shaped relationship between extent of contribution and author order: In all disciplines, first and last authors typically contribute to more tasks than middle authors.

The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the results for the reward system of science.

URL : http://crctcs.openum.ca/files/sites/60/2016/04/Contributorship-Preprint.pdf

Why scientific publications should be anonymous

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Numerous studies have revealed biases within the scientific communication system and across all scientific fields. For example, already prominent researchers receive disproportional credit compared to their (almost) equally qualified colleagues — because of their prominence. However, none of those studies has offered a solution as to how to decrease the incidence of these biases. In this paper I argue that by publishing anonymously, we can decrease the incidence of inaccurate heuristics in the current scientific communication system. Specific suggestions are made as to how to implement the changes.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.05382

Ethics of using language editing services in an era of digital communication and heavily multiauthored papers

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Scientists of many countries in which English is not the primary language routinely use a variety of manuscript preparation, correction or editing services, a practice that is openly endorsed by many journals and scientific institutions.

These services vary tremendously in their scope; at one end there is simple proof-reading, and at the other extreme there is in-depth and extensive peer-reviewing, proposal preparation, statistical analyses, re-writing and co-writing.

In this paper, the various types of service are reviewed, along with authorship guidelines, and the question is raised of whether the high-end services surpass most guidelines’ criteria for authorship. Three other factors are considered.

First, the ease of collaboration possible in the internet era allows multiple iterations between authors and the editing service, so essentially, papers can be co-written.

Second, ‘editing services’ often offer subject-specific experts who comment not only on the language, but interpret and improve scientific content.

Third, the trend towards heavily multi-authored papers implies that the threshold necessary to earn authorship is declining.

The inevitable conclusion is that at some point the contributions by ‘editing services’ should be deemed sufficient to warrant authorship. Trying to enforce any guidelines would likely be futile, but nevertheless, it might be time to revisit the ethics of using some of the high-end ‘editing services’.

In an increasingly international job market, recognizing this problem might prove progressively more important in authorship disputes, the allocation of research grants, and hiring decisions.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.2401

A measure of total research impact independent of…

Statut

A measure of total research impact independent of time and discipline :

“Authorship and citation practices evolve with time and differ by academic discipline. As such, indicators of research productivity based on citation records are naturally subject to historical and disciplinary effects. We observe these effects on a corpus of astronomer career data constructed from a database of refereed publications. We employ a simple mechanism to measure research output using author and reference counts available in bibliographic databases to develop a citation-based indicator of research productivity. The total research impact (tori) quantifies, for an individual, the total amount of scholarly work that others have devoted to his/her work, measured in the volume of research papers. A derived measure, the research impact quotient (riq), is an age independent measure of an individual’s research ability. We demonstrate that these measures are substantially less vulnerable to temporal debasement and cross-disciplinary bias than the most popular current measures. The proposed measures of research impact, tori and riq, have been implemented in the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.2124

Research Quality Fairness and Authorship Order The…

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Research Quality, Fairness, and Authorship Order :

“The order in which authors are listed on an academic paper determines the credit that each receives on a co-authored publication, influencing hiring, tenure and promotions. Two of the prevalent author ordering schemes are alphabetical, which involves listing authors in lexicographical order of their last names, implying that all contributed equally, and by contribution, where authors are listed in decreasing order of their contribution to the paper. We perform a game theoretic analysis of the impact of author ordering schemes, uncovering two considerable advantages of alphabetical ordering: it leads to improved research quality, and it is the more fair of the two approaches in the worst case. On the other hand, contribution-based ordering results in a denser collaboration network and a greater number of publications than is achieved using alphabetical author ordering. Furthermore, authors can overcome some of the limitations of contribution-based ordering by performing rotations, alternating who is the first author on joint papers. This often allows authors to achieve optimal research quality and perfect fairness under any given contribution scheme; however, this is obtained at the expense of truthfulness.”

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