Validating a fairer indicator of author contributions to publications

Equal credit for every author creates a bias in different fields and for different co-authorship practices. Professor Lin Zhang at the Wuhan University, China, and Dr Gunnar Sivertsen at the Nordic Institute Studies in Innovation, Research and Education, Norway, are working with the ICSR research team on a project to validate a fairer indicator of author contributions to publications. By building upon the fractionalized approach to counting publications proposed by Professor Zhang, Dr Sivertsen and Professor Ronald Rousseau, we hope to assess the scalability and desirability of a new metric to support the credibility and utility of research evaluation.