Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics

Discussion Papers on Economics,
University of Southern Denmark, Department of Economics

No 17/2015: Co-authorship and the Measurement of Individual Productivity

Karol Flores-Szwagrzak () and Rafael Treibich ()
Additional contact information
Karol Flores-Szwagrzak: Department of Business and Economics, Postal: University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark
Rafael Treibich: Department of Business and Economics, Postal: University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark

Abstract: Consider a database of academic papers where each paper has a scientific worth and a group of authors. We propose a new way of measuring individual academic productivity by evaluating authorship, the extent of an author's contribution to each paper. Our method, CoScore, uses the varying levels of success of all academic partnerships to infer, simultaneously, overall individual productivity and authorship: the worth of a paper is distributed proportionally to each co-author's productivity, defined as the sum of her contributions to all papers. The CoScores of all authors are determined endogenously via the solution of a fixed point problem. We show that CoScore is well-defined and that it is uniquely characterized by three properties: consistency, invariance to merging papers, and invariance to merging scholars. We illustrate CoScore for the two thousand most cited papers in economics.

Keywords: Authorship; Co-authorship network; Ranking methods; PageRank

JEL-codes: D70; D71; D89

26 pages, December 23, 2015

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