Contributorship in scientific collaborations: The perspective of contribution-based byline orders
Introduction
Collaboration is vital to the production of scientific knowledge (Larivière et al., 2015; Lee et al., 2019; Wuchty et al., 2007). It enables researchers to build larger teams (Cronin, 2001; Chawla, 2019) and produce more high-quality knowledge (Amjad et al., 2017; Larivière et al., 2015). Scholars from bibliometrics and related fields have investigated the mechanism of scientific collaboration (e.g., Lee et al., 2019; Wu et al., 2019) by examining authorship, i.e., the byline information provided for publications (e.g., Bu et al., 2020; Perneger et al., 2017). This research has developed our understanding of the structure of scientific collaborations (e.g., Arroyo Moliner et al., 2017), their dynamics (e.g., Lee et al., 2019), and interactions between scholars from an external/macro perspective (Zhao et al., 2021).
However, the macro perspective through authorship on scientific collaborations often overlooks the specific interactions between collaborators on a particular project, i.e., the specialization and division of labor within it. To capture the fine-grained detail of scientific collaboration demands close attention to the interactions between actual collaborators (Haeussler & Sauermann, 2020; Lu et al., 2020; Sauermann & Haeussler, 2017). Observational studies of the micro-world of scientific collaborations are relatively rare in the literature (e.g., Lu et al., 2020; Ni et al., 2021) but have found that collaborators usually form small groups to work together as co-contributors (described as teamplayers by Lu et al. (2020)), or work independently as individual contributors (specialists), or even switch between the two (versatiles) to achieve their common research objectives (Lu et al., 2020). It is often difficult to assess the contribution of each collaborator fairly, especially when collaborations are made on both an individual and co-contributory basis (Bao & Zhai, 2017; Xu et al., 2016). This is problematic because the inaccurate assessment of collaborators’ contributions may harm the sustainability of scientific collaborations (Wang et al., 2020). Given that contribution-based byline order is usually the primary source for deciding collaborators’ credit for contribution, it is valuable to examine whether the contributorship, especially the co-contributorship, can be well encapsulated by the byline order; otherwise, it would be difficult for us to fairly assess each collaborator's contribution to their scientific publications.
To that end, the present study explored how the different contributing roles of collaborators1 (as states of contributorship) were related to byline order across disciplines and team sizes. We examined whether versatiles, specialists, and teamplayers were more likely to feature at the start of the byline or at the end, and whether this varied according to the size and disciplinary area of teams. To this end, we compiled and analyzed a dataset of 105,192 research articles containing author contribution statements and byline order information. This data was obtained from 173,472 full-text articles published in a range of Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals on different subjects, which we had collected in our previous two studies (Lu et al., 2019a; Lu et al., 2020).
The rest of this article is structured as follows. Section 2 provides an overall review of the literature. Then, Section 3 describes our methodology, introducing our research questions, our data collection and the main methods applied in our study. Section 4 then analyses our main findings to answer our four research questions. Finally, Section 5 summarizes our main results and presents our conclusions.
Section snippets
Literature review
In this section, we first introduce studies of scientific collaboration from both the macroscopic and microscopic perspectives. We then review research into author contribution assessment that examines byline order information.
Methodology
In this section, we provide a brief description of our methodology. First, we propose our research questions, then describe our dataset, and, finally, detail the specific methods employed to analyze the data.
Findings
In this section, we answer our four research questions. We first report the relationship between collaborators’ byline orders and their contributions before comparing the byline order distributions of the three contributing roles in scientific collaborations. Finally, we detail how team size and disciplinary context influenced the byline order distributions of the three contributing roles.
Discussion and Conclusions
In an earlier study (Lu et al., 2020), we identified three types of contributorship, i.e., versatiles, teamplayers, and specialists. In this article, we have investigated how these are manifested in scientific collaboration by comparing the byline order distributions of the three types of contributorship across subjects and varying team sizes. For this, we generated a dataset comprising 105,192 articles with parsed author contribution statements and byline order information from the data we had
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Chao Lu: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Writing – original draft. Chenwei Zhang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – review & editing. Chengrui Xiao: Methodology. Ying Ding: Supervision, Writing – review & editing.
Acknowledgement
This article is an outcome of the youth project "Study of Scientific Collaborators’ Scientific Effectiveness from The Perspective of Division of Labor" (ID: 72004054) supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the project "The Causal Effect of Team Diversity on Team Performance" supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (ID: B220201058). The authors appreciate the anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments for the improvement of this
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