Drawing on a comprehensive and multidisciplinary dataset of contributorship statements of more than 87,000 scientific papers, Larivière, Desrochers, Macaluso, Mongeon, Paul-Hus et Sugimoto (2016) bring to light a clear distinction between technical and conceptual contributions: While conceptual tasks are typically associated with authors with higher seniority, technical tasks are more often performed by younger scholars. Results of this study, to be published in Social Studies of Science, show that in all disciplines, first and last authors typically contribute to more tasks than middle authors, providing evidence of a U-shaped relationship between extent of contribution and author order.
This content has been updated on March 8 2017 at 10 h 37 min.
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