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Fairly sharing the credit of multi-authored papers and its application in the modification of h-index and g-index

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Abstract

Except the alphabetic ordering authorship papers, the citations of multi-authored papers are allocated to the authors based on their contributions to the paper. For papers without clarification of contribution proportion, a function of author number and rank is presented to rightly determine the credit allocated proportion and allocated citations of each author. Our citation allocation scheme is between the equally fractional counting and the one using the inverse of author rank. It has a parameter to adjust the credit distribution among the different authors. The allocated citations can either be used alone to indicate one’s performance in a paper, or can be applied in the modification of h-index and g-index to represent the achievement of a scientist on the whole. The modified h-index and g-index of an author makes use of more papers in which he or she played important roles. Our method is suitable for the papers with wide range of author numbers.

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Acknowledgment

We are grateful to Wendy Powell in Valleyford, Washington USA for editing English of our manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Library, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, 210029, China

    Xuan Zhen Liu

  2. School of Electronic Science and Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry for Life Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, China

    Hui Fang

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  1. Xuan Zhen Liu
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Correspondence to Hui Fang.

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Liu, X.Z., Fang, H. Fairly sharing the credit of multi-authored papers and its application in the modification of h-index and g-index. Scientometrics 91, 37–49 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0571-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0571-y

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