Assigning Credits to Multiple Contributors of a Scholarly Output Using Arithmetic Series

Abstract

As the academic world is focusing deeply on quantification of contributions brought about by researchers, it becomes imperative to assign true and deserving credits to the individuals. Modern-day databases do not account for the number of contributors or sequence number of a contributor in the contributors’ list while assigning credit of a scholarly output. As such, every contributor of a researcher-studded output gets the same credit as does the sole contributor of a single-author output. The current work presents a mathematical method to assign credits based on the number of contributors, the sequence of the contributor in the contributors list (if so required), and the magnitude of commendation achieved per unit time by the scholarly output. The concept of arithmetic series is utilized to materialize the idea of true assignment of credits. A case study is also provided to elaborate working of the mathematical method.