Fractional authorship in nuclear physics

B. Pritychenko ()
Additional contact information
B. Pritychenko: Brookhaven National Laboratory

Scientometrics, 2016, vol. 106, issue 1, No 26, 468 pages

Abstract: Abstract Large, multi-institutional groups or collaborations of scientists are engaged in nuclear physics research projects, and the number of research facilities is dwindling. These collaborations have their own authorship rules, and they produce a large number of highly-cited papers. Multiple authorship of nuclear physics publications creates a problem with the assessment of an individual author’s productivity relative to his/her colleagues and renders ineffective a performance metrics solely based on annual publication and citation counts. Many institutions are increasingly relying on the total number of first-author papers; however, this approach becomes counterproductive for large research collaborations with an alphabetical order of authors. A concept of fractional authorship (the claiming of credit for authorship by more than one individual) helps to clarify this issue by providing a more complete picture of research activities. In the present work, nuclear physics fractional and total authorships have been investigated using nuclear data mining techniques. Historic total and fractional authorship averages have been extracted from the Nuclear Science References database, and the current range of fractional contributions has been deduced. The results of this study and their implications are discussed and conclusions presented.

Keywords: Scientific authorship; Publication analysis; Nuclear data mining; Relational databases; 01-02; 58Z05 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 C92 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-015-1766-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:106:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-015-1766-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-015-1766-4

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().