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Dear Prof. Bess,

The issue of multiple authorship of articles and books is indeed interesting. I will be grateful if you can send me later whatever you write on the topic.  

In <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Israel</st1:country-region></st1:place> the module that determines how a certain part of the higher-education budget is divided among the universities gives each author of an article with a total of N authors a credit of 1/N of the article. I can send you the formal document, but it's in Hebrew so I don't know if that helps you.

Similarly, in rankings of academic researchers and institutions a common practice is to divide the credit for each article equally between the authors. Below I attach a few citations of ranking papers published in various journals; all of them use the principle that each author receives 1/N of the credit for a co-authored article with N authors.

This is based on the idea that when an article is written by several authors, the total credit for the article should not be different from a single-author article, and therefore the credit should be divided among the authors. This also reflects the idea that each author in a co-authored paper works less than if he had to write the entire article by himself.

In disciplines in which co-authorship is listed not alphabetically but based on the magnitude of contribution it might make sense to divide the credit not equally, but the principle that the total credit for an article should be independent of the number of authors still applies (i.e., the sum of credits given to all authors should sum to 100% and not more). Otherwise, it will lead to the undesired result that the credit given to different articles (of the same quality, length, etc.) is unequal – ones with more authors get (overall) more credit – a result that has no apparent justification. I guess that because any unequal division of credit among the authors is arbitrary, equal division of credit is common also in disciplines in which authorship is listed based on the contribution and not alphabetically.

The ranking papers details are:

Tom Coupe, "REVEALED PERFORMANCES: WORLDWIDE RANKINGS OF ECONOMISTS AND ECONOMICS DEPARTMENTS, 1990 –2000," Journal of the European Economic Association, 2003.

Pantelis Kalaitzidakis, Theofanis P. Mamuneas and Thanasis Stengos, "RANKINGS OF ACADEMIC JOURNALS AND INSTITUTIONS IN ECONOMICS," Journal of the European Economic Association, 2003.

Loren C. Scott and Peter M. Mitias, "TRENDS IN RANKINGS OF ECONOMICS DEPARTMENTS IN THE <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S.</st1:country-region></st1:place>: AN UPDATE," Economic Inquiry, 1996.

Richard Dusansky and Clayton J. Vernon, "RANKINGS OF <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> ECONOMICS DEPARTMENTS," The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1998.

Here are quotations about the methodologies used in these papers:

Coupe (JEEA, 2003), writes on page 1311:

"We follow the literature by simply ascribing 1/nth of a paper

to each of the n authors of that paper, a choice that can be justified by referring

to Sauer (1988) who found that the monetary value of papers (in the wage

equation) follows such a rule."

Kalaitzidakis et al. (JEEA, 2003) write on page 1355:

"In papers with n coauthors, each coauthor is allocated 1/n pages of the article."

Scott and Mitias (Economic Inquiry, 1996) write on page 379:

"In papers with n coauthors, each coauthor was allocated 1/n pages of the article."

Dusansky and <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Vernon</st1:place></st1:city> (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1998), write on page 158:

"Departments are then ranked by the total number of adjusted pages produced by their faculty, with each co-author apportioned equal partial credit..."

All the best,

Ofer