Authorship order as an indicator of similarity between article discourse and author citation identity in informetrics

The order of co-authors in a publication can follow different criteria that vary according to the diversity of structural dynamics of the field. This study proposes a methodology to gain insight into the meaning of each position in the by-line, working with a sample of publications from the Journal of Informetrics , based on the similarity between the discourse of an article and the citation identity of each co-author according to their position in the by-line, evaluated by the bibliographic coupling. In addition, we compare these similarities with the level of the contribution of the author to the essential activities for the development of the published research, also by their position in the by-line. We conclude that, for the analyzed area of informetrics, bibliographic coupling portrays different patterns of participation by the authors, especially in relation to the first author, which are not evaluated by other mechanisms and metrics. Therefore bibliographic coupling provides an objective and quantitative perspective to the assessment of author contributions to collaborative research.