UPDATED December 13, 2019 Hyperauthorship: Global Projects Spark Surge in Thousand-Author Papers (via Nature)
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From the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate Analytics:
A new report released today by the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate Analytics identifies a growing number of research articles in the Web of Science with 1,000 or more unique authors across more than 100 different countries. Multi-authorship and research analytics examines the effects of complex and hyper-authorship by author, country, and discipline.
The report argues that data resulting from articles with hyper-authorship, beyond 100 authors and/or 30 countries, produces such erratic, even potentially distorting outcomes, that it should be removed from analysis at a national and institutional level.
The report also describes the combination of many authors plus many countries as driving a complex authorship pattern that differs from more typical academic papers and leads to elevated citation rates. One additional country on an article has a greater citation benefit than one additional author, and author count is linked to a slight but continuous impact rise whereas country count is linked to a steeper impact rise.
The report also finds:
- Complex authorship (many people, many countries) has continued to rise in the last five years with the dramatic emergence of articles with more than 100 countries
- The most frequent number of authors on an article is three and 95% of articles analyzed (14.9 million) have ten or fewer authors
- Author count is linked to a slight but continuous impact rise in Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI)
- 99% of articles have authors from five or fewer countries
- Country count is linked to a steeper and more erratic impact rise in CNCI
Direct to Full Text Report
20 pages; PDF.
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