Collective credit allocation in science.

ABSTRACT: Collaboration among researchers is an essential component of the modern scientific enterprise, playing a particularly important role in multidisciplinary research. However, we continue to wrestle with allocating credit to the coauthors of publications with multiple authors, because the relative contribution of each author is difficult to determine. At the same time, the scientific community runs an informal field-dependent credit allocation process that assigns credit in a collective fashion to each work. Here we develop a credit allocation algorithm that captures the coauthors' contribution to a publication as perceived by the scientific community, reproducing the informal collective credit allocation of science. We validate the method by identifying the authors of Nobel-winning papers th

SUBMITTER: Shen HW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4151753 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature