Abstract
The main drawback of ranking of researchers by the number of papers, citations or by the Hirsch index is ignoring the problem of distributing authorship among authors in multi-author publications. So far, the single-author or multi-author publications contribute to the publication record of a researcher equally. This full counting scheme is apparently unfair and causes unjust disproportions, in particular, if ranked researchers have distinctly different collaboration profiles. These disproportions are removed by less common fractional or authorship-weighted counting schemes, which can distribute the authorship credit more properly and suppress a tendency to unjustified inflation of co-authors. The urgent need of widely adopting a fair ranking scheme in practise is exemplified by analysing citation profiles of several highly-cited astronomers and astrophysicists. While the full counting scheme often leads to completely incorrect and misleading ranking, the fractional or authorship-weighted schemes are more accurate and applicable to ranking of researchers as well as research teams. In addition, they suppress differences in ranking among scientific disciplines. These more appropriate schemes should urgently be adopted by scientific publication databases as the Web of Science (Thomson Reuters) or the Scopus (Elsevier).
Highlights
The simplest way how to measure the quality of scientists is to evaluate the following three integer numbers: the number of published papers, the number of citations, and the h-index introduced by Hirsch [1] and defined as the maximum number of papers of a scientist which are cited at least h times
I propose a simple authorship-weighted scheme which combines basic features of the most important weighted schemes listed in the previous section and compare the h-index calculated by this scheme with the full and fractional counting schemes
York, who have the h-index in the range from 66 to 109 and the collaboration index (c-index) from 3 to 95, according to the Web of Science (WOS) in December 2016, see Table 4
Summary
OPEN ACCESS Citation: Vavryčuk V (2018) Fair ranking of researchers and research teams. The single-author or multi-author publications contribute to the publication record of a researcher This full counting scheme is apparently unfair and causes unjust disproportions, in particular, if ranked researchers have distinctly different collaboration profiles. These disproportions are removed by less common fractional or authorship-weighted counting schemes, which can distribute the authorship credit more properly and suppress a tendency to unjustified inflation of co-authors. While the full counting scheme often leads to completely incorrect and misleading ranking, the fractional or authorship-weighted schemes are more accurate and applicable to ranking of researchers as well as research teams They suppress differences in ranking among scientific disciplines. These more appropriate schemes should urgently be adopted by scientific publication databases as the Web of Science (Thomson Reuters) or the Scopus (Elsevier)
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