Dear scientists,
If the scientific work was done by a team, and some of the team became authors of the publication, the latter are co-authors. When referring to this publication, each of them receives one citation. It does not matter the contribution of each of them. Is this fair? It seems to me that the scientific weight of the contribution of the individual co-author should not be equal to the scientific weight of the publication. In general, it is difficult to assess which of the co-authors worked harder. Maybe someone is a sponsor, and someone is the boss, and the main performer simply decided to please his benefactors. In this case, he sold (or shared) his achievement. This means that the total contribution (for example, a citation) should be divided by the number of co-authors. This will be a fair assessment of the individual collaborator.
Otherwise, an injustice arises in relation to the single author, who took upon himself all the costs. After all, if two publications (1 author and 4 co-authors) turned out to be in the same journal at Scopus or the Web of Science, then it must be assumed that the quality of works is comparable, but the number of beneficiaries is 4 times more for the second article. We must distinguish between the scientific weight of the article and the scientific weight of the contribution of the scientist to this work.
Research Gate conducts work on the evaluation of scientific interest to a separate article. Can the scientific weight of one article be divided by the number of co-authors to estimate the scientific weight of one scientist? Otherwise, each co-author will get 1 unit of impact of the article and the total will be, for example, 4 units. Even if one of the co-authors has not made an effort. But this is a collective contribution! It must be divided by the number of co-authors.
Hi,
This is an important issue. When you have four contributors to an article, you are not sure who contributed more and who contributed less. This problem is also encountered when considering a person for promotion in the academia. If all his papers are collaborated by several researchers, how can you assess his contribution , and his capability as a researcher ?
The problem does not stop there, since science journals' editor usually prefer to accept for publication papers produced by several researchers, rather than by one author.
Research Gate develops a scale of scientific interest (or scientific weight) of publication depending on citation, recommendations, reads. If this integral estimate will be divided by the number of co-authors, we obtain the scientific weight of the researcher according to one publication. Then, summing up such estimates for all publications of this researcher, one can derive a full assessment of the scientist's contribution according to the published works.
In this case, the contributions of the direct executor of the work, the sponsor or the boss will be equal according to one publication. That is, the researcher affects through research, sponsor through financial support, the boss through administrative support and their impacts are the same
"The problem does not stop there, since science journals' editor usually prefer to accept for publication papers produced by several researchers, rather than by one author".
This is very true. You can't imagine that many prestigious journals reject the paper because authors are not famous or because no one of the authors are prestigious. Despite, many similar, not creative or novel works published because one or two of the authors are famous scientists. Moreover, one of the authors may have a good relationship with editors or being one of the editor board of this journal so, it can facilitate the decision and being positive at all. I know many of them and you can see Kilo citations for them.
The ability to provide study subjects for a study is often considered criteria enough for authorship in the author's study.
The main executor of the research may include in the publication a famous scientist as a co-author without a significant contribution. One can raise interest in the work and get a greater impact in this way. This means that the main performer changes part of his contribution to a known name and lowers his own contribution. It seems to me, in this case it would be fair to divide the total impact of the article in equal parts. In fact, each of scientists should receive half of one citation.
If the main author is forced to include a distinguished scholar in order to publish it in a famous journal, then there is a choice: either go to a less titled publisher or share an impact. But to give one citation for each of them is not correct, because it is an article has received a citation.
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