The Byline: Thoughts on the distribution of author ranks in multiauthored papers

Abstract

We analyze the multi-authorship matrix M, defined as the matrix where a cell M(j,k) denotes the number of times authors with j publications are ranked as kth author of an article. We prove that if the distribution of the number of authors per paper follows a power law, then the author rank distribution is approximately equal to this power law (more precisely, equal in Landau's big 0 sense). We further determine the author rank distribution in the case authors can be characterized through a seed number, this is the probability of preceding a fixed author in the byline of an article. Such a seed is determined for alphabetical ranking of authors using the standard western alphabet.