Trends in Equal-Contribution Authorship: A Large-Scale Bibliometric Analysis of Biomedical Literature
arXiv:2603.23569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Equal-contribution authorship, in which two or more authors are designated as having contributed equally, is increasingly common in scientific publishing. Using approximately 480,000 tagged records from PubMed and PMC (2010-2024), we examine temporal trends, journal-level patterns, geographic distributions, and byline positions of equal-contributing authors. Results show a sharp rise after 2017, with both high-output mega-journals and smaller, discipline-specific journals contributing to the growth. Journal-level analysis indicates a median increase in the share of […]