I have a paper which the first two authors are contributed equally, is there any way to show in arxiv page (or scholar page) that authors are equal? Maybe a star on names in submit names or something. thanks.
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5What field are you in? Some fields don't pay attention to authorship priority. For example, mathematics generally doesn't do authorship priority. If you want to put in some sort of priority notice it is probably best to do so somehow inside the file itself, such as a footnote simply stating that neither author should be considered a second author.– JoshuaZNov 21, 2018 at 18:14
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1Yes, there is a way on google scholar - you can add a * next to the name of all first-authors by manually editing the entry! Citations will be kept– PuglOct 16, 2022 at 15:32
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4 Answers
There does not appear to be any facility presently in these archives of papers to indicate that contribution of both authors was equal. (I suspect that this is mostly because it is not actually specified in most papers, so it would rarely be able to be known from reading the papers.) In the absence of this, the best fall-back position is to specify this explicitly in the paper with a statement of contributions. Some journals are starting to require this anyway, particularly for research papers submitted by teams of people. There is no reason that you could not add it into your paper if you wish to specify the contributions of the authors.
In regard to this issue, it is worth noting that, except in a relatively small number of cases, the ordering of authors is generally weak information about the magnitude of their contributions to a paper. Conventions and interpretation of the significance of authorship order differs by field. In some fields it would be assumed that earlier authors did the majority of the work, and in other fields there is no such assumption. The main time when you would infer higher contribution from earlier listing is when you have a paper where the first author is a PhD student at a university, and the later authors are academics in the same department, in which case this is usually a paper where the student has done most of the substantive work and the latter are supervisors who have contributed advice, reviews, etc. In most other cases it is difficult to infer contributions solely from the ordering of the authors.
No, there are not any options for indicating equal authorship in e.g., Google Scholar or arXiv, yet. Perhaps this is something to pitch to Google and others.
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2Pitch to Google? I doubt they would ever make a reliable service for adding metadata like this to papers. Google Scholar works mostly because it is doing what they're already good at (search engine, heuristics, profile pages), so it likely comes fairly cheap to Google. They've been asked many times to let authors enhance it with metadata (e.g. because heuristics often get things wrong), and they have never responded to such requests. Academia hasn't been google's priority customer base for ages. Nov 27, 2018 at 21:50
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There is no specific mechanism for doing this, but arxiv submissions do allow you to add comments, which can be seen by anyone who looks at your abstract. You could write "X and Y contributed equally to this work" there if you like. This is not an especially common thing to do in my experience, but people do do it, as you can see here:link to arxiv search
If authors are listed alphabetically and you are in pure math or similar fields, people will assume the contributions are equal. If you are in another field where alphabetical ordering is not the standard, a common practice is to include a footnote stating that authors are listed alphabetically.
answered Nov 28, 2018 at 5:31
