In search of an empirical definition of the disproportionate multi-authoring for the evaluation of the research activity in Psychology

Abstract

A detailed criterion for the evaluation of the authors’ research activity is the active participation in the contribution to be assessed. The participation must be defined in cases of multi-authoring, being specified a definition in each field. In psychology, the norm states that when the number of authors was disproportionate, the rating of the contribution will be diminished. Nevertheless, the norm does not establish the criterion to classify the multi-authoring as disproportionate. For this, a search of the papers and reviews published classified by field categories by Spanish researchers in journals indexed in the Core Collection of the Web of Science in the period 2013-2018 were performed, finding 5.781 registers. The results exhibited than 4,4% of the publications were authored by an atypical number of authors (outliers or extreme values) and, for this reason, these should be disregarded as assessable contributions. The criteria to stablish an atypical by filed are empirically defined. Furthermore, the abnormal values by field in both sides of the distribution, negative and positive, were outlined. From these, empirical cut-offs for each field of psychology to reduce the rating of a contribution were inferred.