Contributorship in scientific collaborations: The perspective of contribution-based byline orders

Scientific collaboration empowers scholars to build larger teams and produce more high-quality knowledge. However, with insufficient microscopic examination of scientific collaboration, i.e., the interactions between collaborators, little is currently known about whether the contributing roles of collaborators are fairly and accurately represented on the bylines of scientific papers. To fill this gap, the current study examines how the different roles of collaborators are connected to the order of their names in article bylines across disciplines and team sizes. A dataset of 105,192 articles containing author contribution statements was compiled and analyzed to investigate the byline order distributions of three different contributing roles: versatiles, specialists, and teamplayers. We discovered that, across all disciplines, the order of names in article bylines usually represented authors’ contributions. Versatiles were more likely to be first authors in the byline, followed by teamplayers and specialists. We also found that the division of labor in larger teams varied between disciplines. In some subjects, the three contributing roles disappeared as the size of teams increased, while in others, they remained distinct. Finally, larger team sizes were associated with a weaker relationship between byline ordering and contributing roles. These findings advance studies of scientific collaboration and enrich the literature on the evaluation of scientific performance.