Percentage-Based Author Contribution Index. A universal, measure of author contribution to scientific articles

Abstract

Deciphering the amount of work provided by different co-authors of a scientific paper has been a recurrent problem in science. Despite the myriad of metrics available, the scientific community still largely relies on the position in the list of authors to evaluate contributions, a metric that attributes subjective and unfounded credit to co-authors. We propose an easy to apply, fair and universally comparable metric to measure and report co-authors contribution in the scientific literature. The proposed Author Contribution Index (ACI) is based on contribution percentages provided by the authors, preferably at the time of submission. Researchers can use ACI for a number of purposes, including comparing the contributions of different authors, describing the contribution profile of a researcher or analysing how contribution changes through time. We provide an example analysis based on data collected from 97 scientists from the field of ecology who voluntarily responded to an online anonymous survey.