Rating a Researcher’s Cumulative Scholarly Output Based on Their Sequence Numbers in Multi-Authored Publications

Abstract

As the academic world yields an ever-increasing research output in terms of journal papers, conference proceedings, and books, the rating of published works and authors becomes imperative. All the big citation databases and search engines are currently using cumulative output indices, such as h-index, i10-index, and g-index, which do not consider the number of co-authors or the researcher’s sequence number in the authors list of a publication. In this context, the article presents a novel computational approach for evaluating a researcher’s scholarly output by taking into account the total number of co-authors, the sequence number of the researcher in the authors list, and the number of citations received per year by an article. Arithmetic progression is applied to quantify the credit for each co-author of a publication. The respective credits of a researcher are then accumulated for all their publications to obtain the rating. The method yields a truer value of the researcher’s impact in terms of their scholarly activities. A global implementation of the metric presented in this work will curb the unethical practice of including the names of non-contributing researchers in the authors list and expecting reciprocity in return.