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In the scientific community, authorship is a key mechanism for establishing intellectual priority, securing peer recognition, and assigning responsibility for scientific claims. Over the past two decades, in response to contemporary research practices – characterized by a proliferation of coauthors, increasingly diverse interpretations of authorship roles, and concerns surrounding scientific misconduct – an expanding number of journals have adopted the practice of explicitly disclosing authors’ contributions in published articles.

In this thesis, these author contribution statements serve as the foundation for examining how authorship is attributed, ordered, and valued in the life sciences, a field that has experienced rapid growth in collaborative research. Given the growing reliance on metric-based evaluative mechanisms in academia, the thesis addresses two main objectives: (1) to clarify how authorship is awarded in lab-based life sciences and how authors’ contributions relate to author order, and (2) to validate different models for allocating author credit against the information presented in author contribution statements. This thesis also examines “acknowledgees” – hereafter referred to as subauthors –who are often overlooked despite representing a substantial and sometimes critical segment of the scientific community.

The main results suggest that most authors are core or middle layer contributors, i.e., they perform at least one core layer task or middle layer task. In contrast, most subauthors are classified as outer layer contributors. Authors typically undertake multiple tasks, in contrast to subauthors, and exhibit greater specialization in larger research teams compared to smaller ones. The results also suggest a discrepancy between traditional author guidelines and actual scientific practice regarding author attribution, evident in the significant proportion of outer layer authors.

In addition to these findings, when contributions are ordered by byline position, they exhibit a distinct u-shaped distribution. Among the tested author credit models (u-shaped, arithmetic, fractional, geometric, harmonic), the u-shaped model most accurately reflects observed author contributions, exhibiting the closest alignment with empirical data on core and middle-layer tasks. Furthermore, it also surpasses the other models in predicting which authors are core and which are not.

This paper explores the relationship between an author's position in the bylines of an article and the research contributions they have made to analyze the validity of five bibliometric counting methods (arithmetic, fractional, geometric, harmonic, and harmonic parabolic author credit allocation) in the field of Chemical Biology. By classifying the tasks found in the author contribution statements of articles published in Nature Chemical Biology according to a three-tiered scheme, it was possible to divide the authors into three types: core-layer authors, middle-layer authors, and outer-layer authors. When ordering the authorships according to the position in the bylines, there is a distinct u-shaped distribution for the share of authors involved in writing the paper or designing the research (i.e., core authors) and for the average number of tasks performed by each author. The harmonic parabolic model best distributes author credit according to the observed empirical data. It also outperforms the other models in predicting which authors are core authors and which are not. The harmonic parabolic model should be the preferred choice for bibliometric exercises in chemical biology and fields with similar practices regarding authorship order.

Introduction. Many bibliometric studies of library and information science has been performed over the years, almost without exception based on research papers from Web of Science. The purpose of this paper is, using bibliometric techniques, to conceptualize library and information science according to the information use of students, instead of the information use of researchers.

Method. A citation index was constructed, containing reference data from 210 master theses, allowing for in-depth bibliometric analysis.

Analysis. Various basic bibliometric indicators were calculated in Excel and SPSS, while bibliographic coupling and cluster analysis was applied using R.

Results. The price index for the total population of documents indicates that library and information science should be considered a soft science. On the whole the result of the bibliographic coupling, revealing 32 clusters of which a large majority contained practice-focused theses using different qualitative methods as the main mode of research technique, supports this.

Conclusions. Using master theses as a data source to conceptualize library and information science bibliometrically, produces significantly different results then when traditional data sources is used. Earlier bibliometric studies have tended to downplay the amount of practice-oriented research, and thus also to underestimate the impact of researchers involved with such questions.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to identify the research contributions of authors and subauthors in order to outline how authorship, as opposed to acknowledgment, is awarded in the lab-based life sciences.

Design/methodology/approach - The work tasks described in author contribution statements and acknowledgments sections of research articles published in Nature Chemical Biology were classified according to a three-layered taxonomy: core layer; middle layer; outer layer.

Findings - Most authors are core or middle layer contributors, i.e. they perform at least one core or middle layer task. In contrast, most subauthors are outer layer contributors. While authors tend to be involved in several tasks, subauthors tend to make single contributions. The small but significant share of authors performing only outer layer tasks suggests a disconnect in author attribution between traditional author guidelines and scientific practice. A level of arbitrariness in whether a contributor is awarded authorship or subauthorship status is reported. However, this does not implicate first or last authorships.

Research limitations/implications - Data from one journal only are used. Transferability is limited to research in high impact journals in the lab-based life sciences.

Originality/value - The growth in scientific collaboration underlines the importance of gaining a deeper understanding of the distinction between authorship and subauthorship in terms of the types of research contributions that they de facto represent. By utilizing hitherto unexplored data sources this study addresses a gap in the literature, and gives an important insight into the reward system of science.