I am a post-graduate student in dentistry; planning to publish an article either in an Indian journal or an international one. How does having co-authors like our seniors or our professors affect number of citations for my published article?
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1Welcome to Academia SE. I edited your question to be more focussed on one question that has not been asked here yet. Please see whether everything is still according to your intentions. As for other implicit questions, I suggest that you browse the authorship tag and in particular take a look at this and this question.– Wrzlprmft ♦Commented Jul 19, 2015 at 9:09
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Everything else equal; more authors usually means more (self)citations, and more authors coming from different backgrounds and separate networks will mean more citations, since they will continue publishing independently afterwards. Citations (even if they are selfcitations) usually also leads to further citations, since each citation gives the paper exposure. This is naturally not a recipe for how authorship should be granted, but merely a couple of observations.– fileunderwaterCommented Jul 20, 2015 at 14:16
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1 Answer
First of all, let me make it clear that I'm addressing your question with the hope that you tacitly mean co-authors who made significant enough contributions to deserve authorship, and not talking about gifting co-authorship to people who haven't. Ethically, the latter is wrong, even when the person in question is the PhD supervisor, and hasn't contributed enough to deserve authorship. Thus, what I'm referring to below is the issue of publishing with or without co-authors who deserve to be co-authors.
In an ideal world, what should matter is only whether the content of article is scientifically sound, and not the brand value of the authors. What is wrong does not become right when stated by a bigshot. But in parallel, there is a question of credibility, and that is generally higher for people who are known to have done some good work in the past, as opposed to a newbie. But even with that, it is not that people do not read the works of newbies, just that in the real world, people are less likely to be as critical of a bigshot, as they would be of a newbie. That's just to say that we do not live in an ideal world. However, if the science in the newbie's work is accurate, it will fetch respect too. That's how eventually everyone grows in stature.
However, we should distinguish between exposure and citations. Even with my arguments above, being on the same wagon as a bigshot may ensure more exposure (i.e. more people look at it, even though it may not go any further than that), citations are not really entailed by a greater exposure, but are more reflective of the utility of the article. Thus, a useful work is going to get cited irrespective of who is on the author list, and exposure only increases the odds of the same.
answered Jul 19, 2015 at 12:28
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1the issue of publishing with or without co-authors who deserve to be co-authors — And this in turn means the issue of doing research with or without others who might make a significant enough contribution to deserve co-authorship.– JeffECommented Jul 20, 2015 at 17:25