Economists spend immense amounts of time ranking journals, partly to decide on monetary and non-monetary professional rewards, partly as pure gossip. There is some imperfect agreement on rankings.
Given that agreement, how should we credit coauthored publications (the overwhelming majority of papers)? For the same quality of paper, with N authors does credit get apportioned as 1/N-does an author of a paper with two authors get 50 percent credit; or is the credit more than that? I would think that in equilibrium credit would be apportioned as 1/N; otherwise I would put a friend’s name on my papers, she would put mine on hers, and we’d both get more credit in total. Two young guys I know say that they do exactly that.
Credit at 1/N seems reasonable and is consistent with an old piece of empirical research (Raymond Sauer, Journal of Political Economy, 1988). But one institution I know of gives you 0.71 credit for a two-authored paper, 0.58 credit if you are one of three authors, 0.5 if one of four (using a credit rule of 1/square root(N)). It just started offering a bonus of $23,000 for a sole-authored publication in one of five top journals. But if you are one of two authors, you get $16,250.
This seems absolutely nuts to me, as it gives explicit monetary incentives to multiply co-authors. Why write one paper and get $23,000 when you can share co-authorships with a friend and get $32,500? Since economists always rise to the challenge of responding to incentives, I would bet that this institution sees a lot more coauthored papers by its faculty than before. Better quality, maybe, although I’m dubious; more coauthors for sure.
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#8 -
Extremely well said.
Reminds me of a friend’s idea for the academic chain letter…add the person at the top as a co-author on your next paper, add your name to the bottom, and send off to 5 colleagues (preferably in wildly different fields).
It is not always easy working with others. I tried collaborating with a friend (with whom I had been talking about science for more than 30 years. I had developed writer’s block and so met one on one with him for about 2-3 days and the conversation was helpful in the long run. But in the end, I found myself unable to do science this way. My friend’s personality was too overbearing and my own need to work this out for and by myself too powerful. So the collaboration ended. I still have reason to consider my friend’s contribution to my own work as important (necessary) and will credit where credit is due.
This is not to say that all collaborations don’t succeed and that they all are the same. . One of my first research jobs was in the research department of an insurance company. There were three of us and because we worked so well together, we were able to write a paper that was the result of our throwing around our different ideas and we succeeded. Perhaps it is a matter of the circumstances. I know of another successful collaboration between two colleagues.. But In that case, the author’s worked independently and held quite different views. They would send each other materials by mail and, despite their differences, apparently had developed a good working relationship .
And then my husband and i have collaborated on numerous occasions- of writing ads and promotional materials based upon the research that I did or that we both did..I must admit- it has always been a great experience.
And come to think of it, if I had to list everyone who made a contribution to the book that I am now writing , there would be too many people to name whose ideas in some way influenced my own. So at what point does the individual take credit for the work they did whcih is somewhat based upon what others already have accomplished..
I have a comment and a question.
Comment: The idea of cooking up an ultimate citation formula for measuring or incentivizing scientific research seems to me largely fruitless. The main issue is this: What if you had perfect data about the whole future of every detail of the universe and could calculate anything? What then would define scientific impact? That is, all of these crude citation counting measures are presumably attempts to measure some approximation of that ultimate thing, but no-one has a good idea of what that ultimate thing is. Whatever the ultimate measure, probably H-index is closer to it than is the total number of papers, say. But resolving finer than that with co-author counts and so on seems fruitless.
Largely unrelated question: Now that you are on to the economics of academics here is a question. Does anyone know a reasonable scheme for partitioning teaching effort within a department? Some courses are easier to teach than others. Some are more fun than others. Is there a reasonable bidding scheme for partitioning teaching and other departmental service?
The incentives from the university’s standpoint are often quite clear. They prefer to have a professor with 20 joint publications to the same prof with 10 singly authored ones. Indeed, even the ability to co-author with other successful researchers is itself an important signal about networking ability and will increase the fame of the professor and his institution disproportionately to any actual contribution.
Hehe… reminds me of this story from the Annals of Improbable Research
http://improbable.com/2009/01/22/guardian-column-141/
More Scientists Join Gangs
More and more, more and more scientists are ganging up to write research studies. It’s no longer unusual to see a paper that lists more than 500 – that’s five hundred – co-authors.
…
If there were a prize for the largest number of co-authors, it would have gone to the 2,512 people credited with writing Precision Electroweak Measurements on the Z Resonance, which appeared in the journal Physics Reports in 2006. That’s a mild elevation from the previous record of 2,458 co-authors, attained just two years earlier…
This is one market that will, much sooner than later, prove efficient.
I’d like to see the evidence supporting the scheme of academic friends adding each other’s names in papers to augment the bonus of each other.
It is plausible, yes!, it is just wrong and have never heard of it in academia. Smart people who publish in top journals have more interesting or easier ways of making money.
Besides, we build and maintain social norms to make collaboration an co-authorship a productive scientific exercise where there might be some increasing returns to scale to co-authors.
Juan-Camilo Cardenas