China’s previous evaluation system rewarded researchers who were listed as corresponding authors.Credit: Andrii Yalanskyi/iStock via Getty
Researchers in China were up to nine times more likely, between 2016 and 2020, to list multiple corresponding authors on a paper than were academics in other countries, according to a study that tracked authorship trends over that period.
The analysis, published in Scientometrics1, by a team of researchers in China, examined nearly 1.75 million articles indexed by Clarivate’s Web of Science over the five-year period to assess how common papers with multiple corresponding authors are around the world.
The results show that in 2020, around 30% of papers by researchers in China had more than one corresponding author — nearly three times the global average. That figure increased from 21.6% in 2016. The global average, by comparison, was relatively stable over the period, increasing from 7.1% to 8.8%.
In academic publishing, the corresponding-author position is typically assigned to the person who is responsible for managing communications with journal editors and handling all manuscript-related correspondence after publication. They might also be responsible for administration work such as paying any publishing fees. A corresponding author can double as the first author, the last author or any co-author, depending on how the research team assigns roles.
Researchers in Singapore and South Korea were also found to have high proportions of papers with multiple corresponding authors, both at just under 20% for the 2016–20 period. When papers from China, Singapore and South Korea were excluded from the data set, the average share fell to just over 7.5%.
The disparities between China and other countries differed depending on the discipline. In medicine and pharmacology, for instance, researchers from China were roughly nine times more likely to list more than one corresponding author relative to the global baseline (excluding South Korea and Singapore), whereas in humanities and social sciences, that figure was around five times.
Assigning credit
In big, collaborative research projects, multiple corresponding authors can reflect genuine shared leadership and responsibility, says Wencan Tian, a social scientist at Beijing Normal University in Zhuhai and a co-author of the study.
However, the high value placed on particular authorship positions in some countries’ research-evaluation systems can make corresponding authorships vulnerable to misuse.
The evaluation system that was in place in China when the study was undertaken placed particular emphasis on first- and corresponding-author positions when it came to deciding who would get promotions, financial rewards and access to research funding, says Tian, which might explain the results of the analysis.
China has since reformed this system, and it is now closer to “internationally recognized principles that emphasize substantive contribution, peer evaluation and differentiated assessment”, says Tian.
These reforms reduce the likelihood of researchers using authorship roles “as mere tools for status distribution”, he adds.
China’s research evaluation revamp should not mean fewer international collaborations
Shifting incentives
In early 2020, China’s education and science ministries issued a joint official statement that institutions should stop promoting or recruiting researchers solely on the basis of number of papers or citations. The move prompted a major shift away from using publication records in the Science Citation Index (SCI), an international database of articles and citation records run by analytics firm Clarivate, based in London, as a means to evaluate and rank the country’s researchers and institutions2.
Subsequently, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), a governmental agency that funds basic research, ended a policy that paid cash rewards to researchers for having a paper published. It also implemented stricter measures against gift authorship, a practice in which researchers are added as co-authors without contributing much or any work to the paper.
The NSFC now requires that researchers explicitly state their contributions to papers and strictly prohibits authors from lying about their contributions or exaggerating their roles, says Tian. “Such rules are instrumental in curbing irregular authorship practices and ensuring that authorship reverts to its core functions: reflecting academic responsibility and actual contribution.”
