Citation Statistics, Author Numbers, Matrices and All That. (November 16, 2008)

Earlier this month a reader pointer out that theoretical astrophysicists got the short end of the stick when compared to stargazers because of the tendency for committees evaluating grant applications to ignore the number of contributors to a publication.

As a theoretical astrophysicist it drives me nuts to have the ARC compare my publication record to those of astronomers who often have 40 or more co-authors. It's so obviously inappropriate to do so but until Thomson ISI tell us how many co-authors are on a paper (other than us counting them up ourselves) panels will simply go with straight h-indices.

Our correspondent isn't the only one perturbed by this iniquity. On October 24, 2008 Noah Gray a neuroscience editor for Nature addressed the matter in his blog.

In a letter to Science last week, Dr. Cagan Sekercioglu proposed a plan [to produce a metric] to quantify the amount of work conducted by each author on a paper, so as to have a better gauge of the role played by each contributor.

"I propose that the kth ranked coauthor be considered to contribute 1/k as much as the first author. This way, coauthors’ contributions can be standardized to sum to one, regardless of the author number or how authors are ranked. Author rank can be different from author order, provided that this is declared in the paper. Multiple authors can have the same rank, as long as this is stated and is reflected in the calculations."

This sounds more than reasonable as a calculation. But the fractional authorial assignment would be so arbitrary and variable from lab to lab (and perhaps even within a lab!), that this metric would have little value to anyone without a means to normalize the numbers... Even if the number could be normalized somehow (I doubt it), I still think that this would be a better measure of how nice open to collaboration one is as opposed to whether one is a good scientist.

The topic of “too many authors” has been lamented for some time now, starting with a letter to Science in 1958; I’ll just post it here:

   Too Many Authors

A letter from Z. I. Kertesz [Science 128, 610 (1958)] deplores references which use “et al.” after the first author’s name, particularly when more than three authors are involved. There is cogent argument that, for anything short of a monographic treatment, the indication of more than three authors is not justifiable, in general. In fact, minor contributors should be listed-and their specific contributions shown-in the acknowledgments. A particular report comes to mind that appeared under merely one author’s name. It describes the properties of a rare mineral which had not been adequately characterized or previously reported from localities outside of Russia. This article was written by a mineralogist who used data obtained by a chemist (analytical determinations), a physicist (electron micrographs), and two spectroscopists (minor components). This six-page article might have had five authors, but the fact remains that the over-all responsibility for evaluating the data depended upon a single individual, the mineralogist. In many instances the only justification for the use of more than three authors’ names seems to be the accumulation of bibliographical credit for minor contributions. This situation, if abused (and it has been) can readily become ridiculous. It is discouraged, to some extent, by the use of “et al.” in citing papers that are overloaded with authors.
 

DUNCAN MCCONNELL
College of Dentistry,
Ohio State University, Columbus

Noah Gray concludes his blog:

Dr. McConnell would be livid over the situation today, I am assuming. My, my, how things change.

So on this contribution of quantification, I am fully in the camp of a particular forum discussion commenter when he said:

"Bad measures of productivity are actively harmful to science, and that is something that their advocates should bear in mind. They are encouraging dishonesty."

I would say that this metric has the potential to be one of these “bad measures of productivity”.

At the beginning of this month Australia scored its new Chief Scientist. To date she has kept a low profile. It remains to be seen if Professor Sackett will make public her views on the approach(es) to be taken on the evaluation of university research by public granting agencies and the proposed Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) evaluation procedures currently under consideration by the federal government.