Un método para cuantificar las contribuciones de los colaboradores en las publicaciones científicas

Authorship has become a hot topic in the past decades, especially in the field of biomedical sciences. Concern about this issue is increasing in other sciences as well, due to the importance of authorship for scientific careers and funding. I propose a method to quantify collaborators’ relative contributions to scientific publications, from which contributorship (collaborators who sign the publication and their order of appearance) can be established. This method begins with an initial agreement among collaborators based on principles of distribution of credit and weighting contributions to the design, data gathering, analysis, interpretation, writing and administration phases involved in scientific publication. Standardized application of this method with tables showing the percentage of each collaborators’ involvement would contribute to the assessment of scientists’ productivity and the construction of citation indexes Editorials, indexing services, university departments and laboratories should coordinate policies for the attainment of standardized, unified criteria.

Key words: Contributorship, Authorship, Scientific contributions quantification, Quantification method, Scientific publications.