When we launched Rethinking Ecology, one of the unique feature that we wanted for the journal was a way to quantify the contribution of different co-authors. To this end, we developed a percentage-based author contribution index (ACI), which has been included in every manuscript published in Rethinking Ecology. We briefly introduced the index in our editorial (Boyer et al. 2016), but we wanted to write a full paper to fully describe our index. This paper has now been published in Research Integrity and Peer Review (Boyer et al. 2017). We chose to publish the index paper in a multi-disciplinary journal because we think authorship contribution is a systemic issue in scientific literature and scientists from all disciplines could be interested in using our index.
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. Many of the proposed solutions are either too complicated, not accurate enough or not comparable across articles, authors and disciplines. The author contribution index we propose addresses these three major issues and has the potential to contribute to more transparency in the science literature.
We provide a first insight into how the index could be used based on the analysis of 836 publications from 97 ecology scientists around the world. We hope the index will be taken up by publishers and journals, but we also suggest ways for scientists to use the index regardless of whether or not it is implemented by the journals they are publishing in.
Boyer, S., Lefort, M.-C., & Winder, L. (2016). Rethinking Ecology – Challenging Current Thinking in Ecological Research. Rethinking Ecology, 1, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.3897/rethinkingecology.1.11230
Boyer, S., Ikeda, T., Lefort, M.-C., Malumbres-Olarte, J., & Schmidt, J. M. (2017). Percentage-based Author Contribution Index: a universal measure of author contribution to scientific articles. Research Integrity and Peer Review, 2(1), 18. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-017-0042-y
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