State Key Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry for Life Science, School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University, No. 163, Xianlin Avenue, Qixia District, Nanjing, China.
Sci Eng Ethics. 2018 Oct;24(5):1589-1601. doi: 10.1007/s11948-017-9973-4. Epub 2017 Sep 21.
With the growth of research collaborations, the average number of authors per article and the phenomenon of equally important authorships have increased. The essence of the phenomenon of equally important authorships is the approximately equal importance of authors, both because of the difficulties in comparing authors' contributions to a paper and some actual research evaluation practices, which (approximately) give full paper credit only to the most important authors. A mechanism for indicating that various authors contributed equally is required to maintain and strengthen collaboration. However, the phenomenon of multiple important authors can cause unfair comparisons among the research contributions and abilities of authors of different papers. This loophole may be exploited. Normalizing the credit assigned to a given paper's authors is an easy way to solve this ethical dilemma. This approach enables fair comparisons of the contributions by the authors of different articles and suppresses unethical behaviour in author listings. Bibliometric researchers have proposed mature methods of normalized paper credit assignment that would be easy to use given the current level of computer adoption.
随着研究合作的增长，文章的平均作者数量和同等重要的作者现象都有所增加。同等重要的作者现象的本质是作者的重要程度大致相当，这既是因为难以比较作者对一篇论文的贡献，也是因为一些实际的研究评估实践只（大致）将全部论文学分授予最重要的作者。为了维护和加强合作，需要有一种机制来表明各个作者的贡献是平等的。然而，多个重要作者的现象可能会导致对不同论文的作者的研究贡献和能力进行不公平的比较。这个漏洞可能会被利用。为给定论文的作者分配归一化的信用是解决这一伦理困境的一种简单方法。这种方法能够公平地比较不同文章作者的贡献，并抑制作者列表中的不道德行为。文献计量学研究人员已经提出了成熟的归一化论文信用分配方法，如果考虑到当前计算机的使用水平，这些方法很容易使用。
