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arXiv · 1307.1330

The elephant in the room: multi-authorship and the assessment of individual researchers

George A. Lozano
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Abstract

When a group of individuals creates something, credit is usually divided among them. Oddly, that does not apply to scientific papers. The most commonly used performance measure for individual researchers is the h-index, which does not correct for multi-authorship. Each author claims full credit for each paper and each ensuing citation. This mismeasure of achievement is fuelling a flagrant increase in multi-authorship. Several alternatives to the h-index have been devised, and one of them, the individual h-index (hI), is logical, intuitive and easily calculated. Correcting for multi-authorship would end gratuitous authorship and allow proper attribution and unbiased comparisons.

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George A. Lozano. 2013-07-29. The elephant in the room: multi-authorship and the assessment of individual researchers. https://arxiv.org/abs/1307.1330

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