Expertise as an aspect of author contributions

Abstract

Authors contribute a wide variety of intellectual efforts to a research paper, ranging from initial conceptualization to final analysis and reporting, and many journals today publish the allocated responsibilities and credits with the paper. An overarching yet unreported aspect of these responsibilities is relevant expertise, that is, past experience and knowledge about the phenomenon under study and the context/techniques used to study it. Here, we study author contributions from the perspective of relevant and complementary expertise based on past authorships "conceptual coverage" of the paper at hand. Using concepts from the the MeSH hierarchy assigned to 10.2 million papers in MEDLINE published during 1980-2009, we find that authors collectively cover the great majority of concepts, typically with one dominant author (most often in last position but frequently 2nd-to-last) and each additional author contributing complementary expertise. For example, 2-author papers fail to cover about 20\% of the concepts (i.e, are new to the authors) while 5-author papers fail to cover about 10\%, on average. The relative expertise contributions on multi-author papers vary systematically by career stage and author-position, and has changed over time. We also provide an online tool that provides a temporal profile of expertise contributions for any author in the Author-ity 2009 dataset: http://abel.lis.illinois.edu/legolas