An important issue in bibliometrics is the weighting of co-authorship in the production of scientific collaborations, which are becoming the standard modality of research activity in many disciplines. The problem is especially relevant in the field of high-energy physics, where collaborations reach 3000 authors, but it can no longer be ignored also in other domains, like medicine or biology. We present theoretical and numerical arguments in favour of weighing the individual contributions as 1/Naut where Naut is the number of co-authors. When counting citations we suggest the exponent α ≈ 1, that corresponds to fractional counting. When counting the number of papers we suggest α ≈ 1/3 − 1/2, with the former (latter) value more appropriate for larger (smaller) collaborations.
Bibliometrics for collaboration works
Paolo Rossi
;Alessandro Strumia;
2019-01-01
Abstract
An important issue in bibliometrics is the weighting of co-authorship in the production of scientific collaborations, which are becoming the standard modality of research activity in many disciplines. The problem is especially relevant in the field of high-energy physics, where collaborations reach 3000 authors, but it can no longer be ignored also in other domains, like medicine or biology. We present theoretical and numerical arguments in favour of weighing the individual contributions as 1/Naut where Naut is the number of co-authors. When counting citations we suggest the exponent α ≈ 1, that corresponds to fractional counting. When counting the number of papers we suggest α ≈ 1/3 − 1/2, with the former (latter) value more appropriate for larger (smaller) collaborations.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
