A new method of co-author credit allocation based on contributor roles taxonomy: proof of concept and evaluation using papers published in PLOS ONE

Jingda Ding (), Chao Liu, Qiao Zheng and Wei Cai
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Jingda Ding: Shanghai University
Chao Liu: Shanghai University
Qiao Zheng: Shanghai University
Wei Cai: Shanghai University

Scientometrics, 2021, vol. 126, issue 9, No 11, 7581 pages

Abstract: Abstract Scientific research cooperation and co-authored papers are becoming increasingly popular in the era of big science. However, allocating appropriate credit to each co-author of papers remains a challenge. We consider author contribution declarations according to the contributor roles taxonomy (CRediT) scheme (assigning each co-author to 14 contributor roles) and propose a new method of author contribution to allocate co-authors’ credits reasonably by converting the 14 contributor roles in an article into a binary author-role matrix. Based on the data of PLOS ONE, we further explore the new method’s advantages by comparing with other representative methods: It normalizes the total credits of different articles to 1, avoiding the inflationary bias caused by the increasing number of co-authors; awards different credits per co-author based on the participation rate of contributor roles to avoid the equalization bias; reduces the impact of the increasing number of co-authors on the credit of the first co-author.

Keywords: Contributor role; CRediT; Credit of co-author; Allocation method (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-021-04075-x

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