Arbitrage opportunities in publication and ghost authors

Abstract: In some research evaluation systems, credit awarded to an article depends on the number of co-authors on the article with total credit to the article increasing with the number of co-authors. There are many examples of such evaluation systems (e.g., the United States National Research Council evaluation of graduate programs gave full credit to each co-author). Such credit systems run the risk of encouraging ghost or honorary authorships. In a recent article, Antonio Osorio and Lutz Bornmann (2019) propose a scheme to discourage ghost authorships but increase the total credit to a paper when co-authorships increase. It is shown that if articles are valued more highly as the number of co-authorships increases, then there are opportunities to increase credit by mutually agreeing to add each other as authors. Unrelated authors of unrelated papers may all benefit by expanding their co-author list. I call this phenomena arbitrage--a term borrowed from economics and finance--since the content of the articles do not change, but the value increases by moving to a "market" of more co-authors where articles are valued differently.