Title: Measurement of authorship by publications: a normative approach,
Abstract: Administrators in all academic organizations across the world have to deal
with the unenviable task of comparing researchers on the basis of their
academic contributions. This job is further complicated by the need for
comparing single author publication with joint author publications.
Unfortunately, however, there is no reasonably established consensus on the
method of arriving at such comparisons, which typically involve trading off
accomplishments in teaching, grant writing and academic publication. In this
paper, we focus on the particular dimension of academic publication, and
analyze this issue from a more fundamental perspective than addressed by the
popular $h$-index (which may lead to unfair and counter-intuitive comparisons
in certain situations). In particular, we undertake an axiomatic analysis of
{\it all} possible ways to measure academic authorship for a given dataset of
research articles and find that an egalitarian $e$-index is the \textit{only}
method which satisfies the axioms of anonymity, monotonicity, and efficiency.
This index divides authorship of joint projects equally and sums across all
publications of an author. Thus, our index provides a method to prorate
authorship for multi-author projects, and thereby, delivers more balanced
author comparisons.