Determining scientific impact using a collaboration index

Abstract

Researchers collaborate on scientific projects that are often measured by both the quantity and the quality of the resultant peerreviewed publications. However, not all collaborators contribute to these publications equally, making metrics such as the total number of publications and the H-index insufficient measurements of individual scientific impact. To remedy this, we use an axiomatic approach to assign relative credits to the coauthors of a given paper, referred to as the A-index for its axiomatic foundation. In this paper, we use the A-index to compute the weighted sums of peer-reviewed publications and journal impact factors, denoted as the C-and P-indexes for collaboration and productivity, respectively. We perform an in-depth analysis of bibliometric data for 186 biomedical engineering faculty members and from extensive simulation. It is found that these axiomatically weighted indexes better capture a researcher's scientific caliber than do the total number of publications and the H-index, allowing for fairer and sharper evaluation of researchers with diverse collaborative behaviors.

Collective credit allocation in science

“…Our method has several distinguishing characteristics, differentiating it from current credit allocation procedures that are based on the author list (13)(14)(15)(16)(17). (i) The method offers topicdependent credit share, as each paper's research topic is automatically defined by the body of papers that cite it.…”

“…To show this, we explored five priors for constructing the credit allocation matrix A, each reflecting a different hypothesis about the role of the authors. They are as follows: (i) count prior (12), each author is viewed as the sole author of the particular publication; (ii) fractional prior (14), authors equally share one credit independent of their position in the author list; (iii) harmonic prior (15), authors share one credit with their credit share proportional to the reciprocal of authors' rank in the author list; (iv) axiomatic prior (17), authors share one credit but the credit share of each author is determined by the number of coauthors with lower rank in the author list; and (v) Zhang's prior (16), the first and the corresponding authors get one credit, whereas other authors share one credit dependent on their rank in the author list (see SI Appendix, section S2.2 for details). The first two priors do not depend on the order of authors, whereas the last three do.…”

“…This approach ignores the fact that authors' contributions are never equal and hence dilutes the credit of the intellectual leader. The third allocates scientific credit according to the order or the role of coauthors, interpreting a message agreed on within the respective discipline (15)(16)(17). For example, in biology, typically the first and the last author(s) get the lion's share of the credit, and in some areas of physical sciences, the author list reflects a decreasing degree of contribution.…”

Publication Productivity Pattern of Malaysian Researchers in Scopus from 1995 to 2015

“…[96] The impact from the collaboration certainly can gives some impact towards each countries. [96,97] Developing countries has the high interest to do the collaboration with developed countries in order to learn something and be able to transfer knowledge as much as they can. [98] Another reason happens in collaboration via allocation student.…”

A Discussion on Governmental Research Grants

“…In scientometrics, the number of journal articles and the number of citations of a researcher are the basic indexes to estimate his or her scientific activities. To evaluate more precisely and fairly, scientometrics researchers have presented normalized citations (Leydesdorff and Opthof 2010), direct and indirect citations (Sidiropoulos and Manolopoulos 2005), allocation citations to the co-authors (Stallings et al 2013), as well as other indicators.…”