Co-authorship Credit Allocation Methods in the Assessment of Citation Impact of Chemistry Faculty

This study examined changes in citation index scores and rankings of thirty-five chemistry faculty members at Seoul National University using different co-authorship credit allocation models. Using 1,436 Web of Science papers published between 2007 and 2013, we applied the inflated, fractional, harmonic, network-based allocation, and harmonic+ models to calculate faculty's h-, R-, and normalization of h- and R- index scores and rankings. The harmonic+ model, which is based on our belief that contribution of primary authors should be the same regardless of collaboration, is designed to minimize the penalty for research collaboration imposed by harmonic and NBA models by boosting the contribution of collaborating primary authors to be on the equal footing with single authors. Although citation rankings by different models are correlated with each other within the same type of citation indicator, rankings of many faculty members changed across models, suggesting the importance of an accurate and relevant authorship credit allocation model in the citation assessment of researchers. The study also found that authorship patterns in conjunction with citation counts are important factors for robust authorship models such as harmonic and NBA, and harmonic+ model may be beneficial for collaborating primary authors. Future research that reexamines the models with updated empirical data would provide further insights into the robustness of the models.