Elvira González-Salmón, Victoria Di Césare, Aoxia Xiao, and Nicolás Robinson-García have published a preprint about the contribution of authors in the creation of academic articles. Through a study that has encompassed around 700,000 articles, the authors aimed to better understand how these contributions are distributed across different fields, such as medicine, biology, and physics. They also seek to determine whether the order in which authors’ names appear truly reflects who did the most work, emphasizing evaluation systems like the CRediT taxonomy to help assign credit to each author fairly and clearly.
Below, we link to the abstract of the study and its direct link.
In this research article we present the first cross-disciplinary descriptive analysis on the use of contribution statements. Our main objective is to obtain further insight on contributions by a variety of fields (Multidisciplinary, Health, Life, Physical and Social Sciences) from the largest dataset used up to now. We examine more than 700,000 articles published between 2017 and 2024 in Elsevier and PLOS journals, in combination with bibliometric data extracted from the Scopus database. The descriptive analysis of the dataset focuses on the overall coverage of the merged data, the distribution of authorship and disciplines at paper level, and the interactions between contribution statements, author order and disciplines. Our two main findings indicate that, on the one hand, looking at contributions and authorship order can enrich the way we understand science as a social endeavor. On the other hand, delving deeper into contributorship differences by field is key. We underscore the value of the CRediT taxonomy in unveiling nuanced research dynamics and offering a more equitable framework for evaluation.