Authorship Weightage Algorithm for Academic Publications: A New Calculation and ACES Webserver for Determining Expertise

Abstract

Despite the public availability, finding experts in any field when relying on academic publications can be challenging, especially with the use of jargons. Even after overcoming these issues, the discernment of expertise by authorship positions is often also absent in the many publication-based search platforms. Given that it is common in many academic fields for the research group lead or lab head to take the position of the last author, some of the existing authorship scoring systems that assign a decreasing weightage from the first author would not reflect the last author correctly. To address these problems, we incorporated natural language processing (Common Crawl using fastText) to retrieve related keywords when using jargons as well as a modified authorship positional scoring that allows the assignment of greater weightage to the last author. The resulting output is a ranked scoring system of researchers upon every search that we implemented as a webserver for internal use called the APD lab Capability & Expertise Search (ACES).