Contributorship in scientific collaborations: The perspective of contribution-based byline orders

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2022.102944Get rights and content

Abstract

Scientific collaboration empowers scholars to build larger teams and produce more high-quality knowledge. However, with insufficient microscopic examination of scientific collaboration, i.e., the interactions between collaborators, little is currently known about whether the contributing roles of collaborators are fairly and accurately represented on the bylines of scientific papers. To fill this gap, the current study examines how the different roles of collaborators are connected to the order of their names in article bylines across disciplines and team sizes. A dataset of 105,192 articles containing author contribution statements was compiled and analyzed to investigate the byline order distributions of three different contributing roles: versatiles, specialists, and teamplayers. We discovered that, across all disciplines, the order of names in article bylines usually represented authors’ contributions. Versatiles were more likely to be first authors in the byline, followed by teamplayers and specialists. We also found that the division of labor in larger teams varied between disciplines. In some subjects, the three contributing roles disappeared as the size of teams increased, while in others, they remained distinct. Finally, larger team sizes were associated with a weaker relationship between byline ordering and contributing roles. These findings advance studies of scientific collaboration and enrich the literature on the evaluation of scientific performance.

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

References (53)

  • W. Wang et al.

    Early-stage reciprocity in sustainable scientific collaboration

    Journal of Informetrics

    (2020)
  • M. Zhang et al.

    Scientists’ genders and international academic collaboration: An empirical study of Chinese universities and research institutes

    Journal of Informetrics

    (2020)
  • Z. Zhao et al.

    Characterizing scientists leaving science before their time: Evidence from mathematics

    Information Processing & Management

    (2021)
  • M.J. Ali

    No room for ambiguity: The concepts of appropriate and inappropriate authorship in scientific publications

    Indian Journal of Ophthalmology

    (2021)
  • L. Arroyo Moliner et al.

    Understanding scientific communities: A social network approach to collaborations in talent management research

    Scientometrics

    (2017)
  • P. Bao et al.

    Dynamic credit allocation in scientific literature

    Scientometrics

    (2017)
  • S.B. Bavdekar

    Authorship issues

    Lung India : Official Organ of Indian Chest Society

    (2012)
  • G.S. Becker et al.

    The division of labor, coordination costs, and knowledge

    The Quarterly Journal of Economics

    (1992)
  • V.D. Blondel et al.

    Fast unfolding of communities in large networks

    Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment

    (2008)
  • Y. Bu et al.

    Understanding persistent scientific collaboration

    Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

    (2018)
  • S. Burrows et al.

    Trends in authorship order in biomedical research publications

    Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries

    (2011)
  • D.S. Chawla

    Hyperauthorship: Global projects spark surge in thousand-author papers

    Nature

    (2019)
  • C. Chen et al.

    Leader humility, team job crafting and team creativity: The moderating role of leader–leader exchange

    Human Resource Management Journal

    (2021)
  • E. Chung et al.

    Understanding scientific collaboration in the research life cycle: Bio- and nanoscientists’ motivations, information-sharing and communication practices, and barriers to collaboration

    Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

    (2016)
  • E.A. Corrêa et al.

    Patterns of authors contribution in scientific manuscripts

    Journal of Informetrics

    (2017)
  • J. Delfgaauw et al.

    Team incentives, task assignment, and performance: A field experiment

    The Leadership Quarterly

    (2018)
  • Cited by (5)

    View full text