Title
Collective Credit Allocation In Science
Abstract
Collaboration among researchers is an essential component of the modern scientific enterprise, playing a particularly important role in multidisciplinary research. However, we continue to wrestle with allocating credit to the coauthors of publications with multiple authors, because the relative contribution of each author is difficult to determine. At the same time, the scientific community runs an informal field-dependent credit allocation process that assigns credit in a collective fashion to each work. Here we develop a credit allocation algorithm that captures the coauthors' contribution to a publication as perceived by the scientific community, reproducing the informal collective credit allocation of science. We validate the method by identifying the authors of Nobel-winning papers that are credited for the discovery, independent of their positions in the author list. The method can also compare the relative impact of researchers working in the same field, even if they did not publish together. The ability to accurately measure the relative credit of researchers could affect many aspects of credit allocation in science, potentially impacting hiring, funding, and promotion decisions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1073/pnas.1401992111
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Keywords
Field
DocType
network science, scientific impact, team science
Publication,Economics,Actuarial science,Multidisciplinary approach,Cooperative behavior,Scientific enterprise,Allocation algorithm,Publishing
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
111
34
0027-8424
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
30
1.15
11
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Huawei Shen173961.40
Albert-lászló Barabási246491107.35