Fairly sharing the credit of multi-authored papers and its application in the modification of h-index and g-index

Except the alphabetic ordering authorship papers, the citations of multi-authored papers are allocated to the authors based on their contributions to the paper. For papers without clarification of contribution proportion, a function of author number and rank is presented to rightly determine the credit allocated proportion and allocated citations of each author. Our citation allocation scheme is between the equally fractional counting and the one using the inverse of author rank. It has a parameter to adjust the credit distribution among the different authors. The allocated citations can either be used alone to indicate one’s performance in a paper, or can be applied in the modification of h-index and g-index to represent the achievement of a scientist on the whole. The modified h-index and g-index of an author makes use of more papers in which he or she played important roles. Our method is suitable for the papers with wide range of author numbers.