Collaborations in communication: Authorship credit allocation via a weighted fractional count procedure

To advance bibliometric analyses in the social sciences this study applies a metric to a publication dataset to examine how authorship credit allocation on published manuscripts might influence factors related to proliferation. We utilize a weighted fraction count (WFC) procedure and discuss how this type of method may assist in the evaluation of published research in social science. Using a metric similar to that created by Abbas (2010, 2011) we evaluate a sample of 103 prolific communication scholars’ publication records and illustrate the utility of using a WFC procedure for understanding patterns and trends in communication scholarly production. A strong positive relationship between collaboration and the production of journal articles supported the notion that coauthors may increase proliferation. We also examined gender differences in publishing and coauthoring, with the only difference being that men were more likely to have a higher WFC than women. Additional research questions asked whether scholars’ faculty ranking might influence how they publish and collaborate. Patterns from examining publication data show that senior scholars may tend to publish in a capacity that illustrates they are mentoring younger scholars. The findings of this study illustrate that a WFC procedure for authorship credit allocation already being used in the sciences may be considered for examining prolific scholarship in the social sciences broadly, and the communication discipline specifically.