Understanding co‐corresponding authorship: A bibliometric analysis and detailed overview

Abstract

The phenomenon of co‐corresponding authorship is becoming more and more common. To understand the practice of authorship credit sharing among multiple corresponding authors, we comprehensively analyzed the characteristics of the phenomenon of co‐corresponding authorships from the perspectives of countries, disciplines, journals, and articles. This researcher was based on a dataset of nearly 8 million articles indexed in the Web of Science, which provides systematic, cross‐disciplinary, and large‐scale evidence for understanding the phenomenon of co‐corresponding authorship for the first time. Our findings reveal that higher proportions of co‐corresponding authorship exist in Asian countries, especially in China. From the perspective of disciplines, there is a relatively higher proportion of co‐corresponding authorship in the fields of engineering and medicine, while a lower proportion exists in the humanities, social sciences, and computer science fields. From the perspective of journals, high‐quality journals usually have higher proportions of co‐corresponding authorship. At the level of the article, our findings proved that, compared to articles with a single corresponding author, articles with multiple corresponding authors have a significant citation advantage.