The Byline: Thoughts on the distribution of author ranks in multiauthored papers

✍ Scribed by L. Egghe; Liming Liang; R. Rousseau

• Book ID: 104351306
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 500 KB
• Volume: 38
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0895-7177
• DOI: 10.1016/s0895-7177(03)90090-2

✦ Synopsis

we analyze the multiauthorship matrix M, defined as the matrix where a cell M 1,~. ic) denotes the number of times authors with j publications are ranked as the kth author of an article We prove that if the distribution of the number of authors per paper follows a power law, then the author rank distribution is approximately equal to this power law (more precisely, equal in Landau's big 0 sense). We further determine the author rank distribution in the case where authors can be characterized through a seed number; this is the probability of preceding a fixed author in the byline of an article. Such a seed is determined for alphabetical ranking of authors using the standard western alphabet.