  Collaboration among researchers is an essential component of the modern
scientific enterprise, playing a particularly important role in
multidisciplinary research. However, we continue to wrestle with allocating
credit to the coauthors of publications with multiple authors, since the
relative contribution of each author is difficult to determine. At the same
time, the scientific community runs an informal field-dependent credit
allocation process that assigns credit in a collective fashion to each work.
Here we develop a credit allocation algorithm that captures the coauthors'
contribution to a publication as perceived by the scientific community,
reproducing the informal collective credit allocation of science. We validate
the method by identifying the authors of Nobel-winning papers that are credited
for the discovery, independent of their positions in the author list. The
method can also compare the relative impact of researchers working in the same
field, even if they did not publish together. The ability to accurately measure
the relative credit of researchers could affect many aspects of credit
allocation in science, potentially impacting hiring, funding, and promotion
decisions.
