A declared percentage-based author-contribution system for weighted research metrics: A proposal

This work proposes a declared percentage-based author-contribution system for the computation of weighted, author-level research metrics. The premise is that author-level metrics currently inherit paper-level numbers indiscriminately, regardless of the size of the author list and the actual division of co-authored work. Under the system proposed in this work, the co-authors of a published paper declare, at acceptance, a list of contribution shares summing to 100%; each declared share then multiplies any paper-level metric – citation count, journal impact factor, altmetric score, or any other – to yield the corresponding author-level analogue for that contributor. Paper-level metrics are preserved unchanged, so that each researcher's bibliometric profile is expressed as two complementary metric sets: a paper-level set, identical to current practice and representing each work's contribution to its field; and an author-level set, novel to this proposal, representing the individual's declared contribution. Six archetypal researcher profiles, constructed by contribution style rather than career stage, illustrate how the proposal re-ranks researchers in ways that align author-level evaluation with the underlying division of work. A first empirical exercise – a stratified random sample of 100 active ocean-engineering researchers, computed under equal-share and harmonic-counting stand-ins for the declared shares – populates the central B–C–D archetype band densely and supports the framing of the archetypes as reference markers on a continuum. The implementation pathway is a minimal numeric extension of the existing Contributor Roles Taxonomy submission workflow.