Name order patterns of graduate candidates and supervisors in Chinese publications: a case study of three major Chinese universities

Abstract

Studying three Chinese major universities of different type, this article attempts to validate earlier results related to authors' name order in papers co-authored by graduate candidates and their supervisors. Candidates for the doctoral degree as well as the master's degree are considered.

Defining the g-ratio as the fraction of co-authored publications where the graduate student's name precedes that of the supervisor's we obtain the following results. 1) Generally, master's level g-ratios are smaller than the corresponding doctoral level g-ratios. 2) The three doctoral g-ratio time series have a common characteristic: they tend to a limiting target value of somewhat more than 80%. The master's time series of the three universities extend themselves in parallel with the doctoral time series. 3) The g-ratio of collaborative papers related to the dissertation is higher than the g-ratio of collaborative papers not related to the dissertation. This is true on the doctoral level as well as on the master's level. 4) Different disciplines have different g-ratios, representing disciplinary customs in graduate candidate-supervisor collaboration, the highest g-ratio in the doctoral case occurring in biology (except for Tsinghua University that does not offer courses in biology). 5) There exist only small differences between the g-ratios of different kinds of universities. 6) In recent years, the same candidate-supervisor collaboration patterns exist in international publications as in domestic ones. The fact that the doctoral g-ratios of all three universities are as high as 80% reflects a universal regularity in the structure of scientific collaboration between doctoral candidates and their supervisors in China.