{"title":"Does the Winner Take it All? Increasing Inequality in Scientific Authorship","authors":"H. Rauhut, Fabian Winter, David Johann","doi":"10.1002/9781118900772.ETRDS0459","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Scientific authorship has become a hot topic in the social sciences. We present three avenues addressing this topic from different perspectives to illustrate in which direction research on inequalities in the context of scientific authorship and academic publications may move. We draw on data from the Web of Science focusing on the field of sociology. We demonstrate that (i) the alphabetical order of co‐authors' names sends out an ambiguous signal about the actual contributions of each team member, (ii) attention is increasingly paid to a few contributions that are widely cited, and (iii) well‐connected authors tend to work together. In short, this essay suggests a rise in authorship inequalities regarding the attention authors and their articles receive. Sociology and related social sciences are arguably developing into academic winner‐take‐all markets.","PeriodicalId":197041,"journal":{"name":"Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2018-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"4","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118900772.ETRDS0459","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 4
Abstract
Scientific authorship has become a hot topic in the social sciences. We present three avenues addressing this topic from different perspectives to illustrate in which direction research on inequalities in the context of scientific authorship and academic publications may move. We draw on data from the Web of Science focusing on the field of sociology. We demonstrate that (i) the alphabetical order of co‐authors' names sends out an ambiguous signal about the actual contributions of each team member, (ii) attention is increasingly paid to a few contributions that are widely cited, and (iii) well‐connected authors tend to work together. In short, this essay suggests a rise in authorship inequalities regarding the attention authors and their articles receive. Sociology and related social sciences are arguably developing into academic winner‐take‐all markets.
科学作者身份已成为社会科学领域的一个热门话题。我们提出了从不同角度解决这一问题的三种途径,以说明在科学作者身份和学术出版物背景下对不平等的研究可能会朝着哪个方向发展。我们从关注社会学领域的Web of Science中获取数据。我们证明:(1)合作作者姓名的字母顺序对每个团队成员的实际贡献发出了一个模糊的信号,(2)人们越来越关注被广泛引用的少数贡献,(3)关系良好的作者倾向于合作。简而言之,这篇文章表明作者身份不平等的上升,关于作者和他们的文章收到的关注。可以说,社会学和相关社会科学正在发展成学术上的赢家通吃市场。