The scientific community keeps on finding new ways to facilitate to judge scientists. The old-fashioned way of reading her papers, listening to her talks,  interviewing her for more than an hour, reading recommendation letters, and consulting colleagues personally takes way too much time.

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A problem I often encounter is deciding who to invite as co-authors. On one hand, you want to show appreciation to the people that helped you in the process of obtaining your results. On the other hand, generously adding authors will dilute the contribution of the people that made the largest contribution. In this post I would like to sketch a few hypothetical situations in which someone could be a co-author. The main goal here is to provoke some discussion on this subject, and learn about some good practices.

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Surviving in science these days is all about high impact. How is this impact being measured? Managers, deans,  operators, science editors and grant officers, to mention just a few non-active scientists, know the answer exactly. They judge the scientist by the:

1. number of papers published in refereed journals
2. number of papers in high-impact journals
3. number of citations, and more specifically by the h-index

To remind you: if the h-index of a scientist is 20 the scientist has coauthored 20 papers with at least 20 citations.

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Here is a short contribution on how to correct misspelled citations in Web of Science. Citations have become the currency of science, which is used to reward scientists and scientific institutions. Small variations in citation scores can make millions of pounds difference in the financial outcomes of national Research Assessments . Therefore keeping your citation record updated is of critical importance.

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