Hacker News Reader

Comment by xamuel | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, how does that research assessment treat papers with multiple authors? Does it only give credit to the first author, or does it divide credit by the number of authors?

View on HN

Depends. But usually being first author counts for more in most fields. However, e.g. in particle physics papers with hundreds of authors are common, alphabetically sorted. Sucks to be Z. Zymmer, nice to be A. Aaronson. People from the field of course know about this. Sometimes they might even act accordingly. But politicians and administrators far too often don't.

And then there is bibliometrics, the art of lying with publication statistics. Everything humans get wrong is even worse there. A. Aaronson is different from Al. Aaronson, right? No paper has more than 3 authors, right? Journals always count for something, conferences don't, right? etc.

Turkish higher education committee ignores multi-author papers completely and only counts single-author or advisor-student papers, in the first appointment of professors; and severely discourages multi-author papers in reassessments.

... which is another silly approach. So a pair of researchers who always work together on projects supposedly never publish :-(

They do anyway, because there is no negative consequences for publishing multi-author papers, just not rewarded at first appointment (this is mainly because they failed to figure out which fields have their authors ordered and which have it unordered).

I'd support dividing by number of authors, but it doesn't. A paper counts the same regardless of number of authors (and regardless or whether you're first author or not), unless it has "an atypically high number of authors for its field" (or something like that), in that case the committee can decide not to count it at all.

In Spain, gift authorship (adding authors that didn't do anything, typically in a mutual arrangement) is not uncommon. Not predominant, but definitely not uncommon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com