ERIC Number: EJ993903
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012
Pages: 2
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1536-6367
EISSN: N/A
Not All Authorships Are Created Equal
Borkenau, Peter
Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research and Perspectives, v10 n3 p147-148 2012
Describing, explaining, and discussing various modern indices of scholarly impact as accomplished by Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, and Mahalchik (this issue) is highly commendable, as such measures get increasingly important in hiring and promotion decisions. The author agrees with almost all points made in the target article, except the treatment of shared authorship. It is argued there that adjustments for shared authorship probably would not improve these measures much, if at all. That claim is justified by showing that the rank order of measured scholarly impact is highly consistent, with correlations from 0.79 to 0.91, for a sample of authors across 4 methods to partition publication credit between authors (same credit to all authors, double credit for first author, linearly declining credit, and harmonically declining credit). The problem with this analysis is that none of the established measures of scholarly input, like the total number of citations, the "h" index, the "g" index, and the other 19 indices discussed in the target article, assigns publication merit in one of those 4 ways. Rather, all 22 measures do not partition the publication merit between authors, but assign 100% publication credit to each author in the byline, independent of the number and order of the coauthors. In this commentary, the author contends that ignoring the number of coauthors per article in measures of scholarly impact is not only conducive to biased estimates of scholarly impact, it will also result in an inflation of the number of coauthors per article. Another issue is "how" the publication merit should be partitioned between authors. In this respect, the target article shows that different methods yield similar results. That is good news, as it shows that partitioning publication credit between authors should not give rise to endless debates on the details of the partitioning procedure.
Descriptors: Periodicals, Correlation, Measurement, Outcome Measures, Scholarship, Bibliometrics, Citations (References), Evaluation Methods, Evaluation Criteria, Evaluation Problems, Measurement Techniques, Productivity, Scientific Research, College Faculty, Faculty Promotion, Faculty Publishing, Faculty Evaluation, Professional Recognition, Statistical Analysis, Authors, Personnel Selection
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Opinion Papers
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A