Understanding co-corresponding authorship: A bibliometric analysis and detailed overview

Abstract

The phenomenon of co-corresponding authorship is becoming more and more common. To understand the practice of authorship credit sharing among multiple corresponding authors, we comprehensively analyzed the characteristics of the phenomenon of co-corresponding authorships from the perspectives of countries, disciplines, journals, and articles. This researcher was based on a dataset of nearly 8 million articles indexed in the Web of Science, which provides systematic, cross-disciplinary, and large-scale evidence for understanding the phenomenon of co-corresponding authorship for the first time. Our findings reveal that higher proportions of co-corresponding authorship exist in Asian countries, especially in China. From the perspective of disciplines, there is a relatively higher proportion of co-corresponding authorship in the fields of engineering and medicine, while a lower proportion exists in the humanities, social sciences, and computer science fields. From the perspective of journals, high-quality journals usually have higher proportions of co-corresponding authorship. At the level of the article, our findings proved that, compared to articles with a single corresponding author, articles with multiple corresponding authors have a significant citation advantage.