title: Cooperation and coauthorship in scientific publishing.
abstract: Research collaboration occurs more frequently today than in the past. As a consequence, cooperation and competition are crucial determinants of academic success. In multiauthored publications, not all authors contribute evenly. Hence, some authors end up with less time or resources to work on parallel projects, decreasing their number of publications. Although detailed information on the contribution of each author in multiauthored publications is generally not available, the order of authors often discloses information on differential contributions. Here we analyze the full data set of Physical Review journals to show that, along with the increasingly number of multiauthored publications, first authors incur costs and last authors are bestowed benefits in terms of number of publications. In other words, authors publishing more often as first authors have fewer publications in the short-term than authors publishing more often as last authors. Using a simplified network representation where direct links represent the costly action of first authors towards last authors, we analyze the evolution of cooperation in multiauthored publications.
authors: Department of Mathematics, The University of British Columbia, 1984 Mathematics Road, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z2.
authors: Lucas
authors: L
authors: Wardil
authors: Department of Mathematics, The University of British Columbia, 1984 Mathematics Road, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z2.
authors: Christoph
authors: C
authors: Hauert