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Attributing credit to coauthors in academic publishing: The 1/n rule, parallelization, and team bonuses

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  • de Mesnard, Louis

Abstract

Universities looking to recruit or to rank researchers have to attribute credit scores to their academic publications. While they could use indexes, there remains the difficulty of coauthored papers. It is unfair to count an n-authored paper as one paper for each coauthor, i.e., as n papers added to the total: this is “feeding the multitude” . Sharing the credit among coauthors by percentages or by simply dividing by n (“1/n rule”) is fairer but somewhat harsh. Accordingly, we propose to take into account the productivity gains of parallelization by introducing a parallelization bonus that multiplies the credit allocated to each coauthor.

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  • de Mesnard, Louis, 2017. "Attributing credit to coauthors in academic publishing: The 1/n rule, parallelization, and team bonuses," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 260(2), pages 778-788.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ejores:v:260:y:2017:i:2:p:778-788
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2017.01.009
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    2. Donthu, Naveen & Reinartz, Werner & Kumar, Satish & Pattnaik, Debidutta, 2021. "A retrospective review of the first 35 years of the International Journal of Research in Marketing," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 38(1), pages 232-269.

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