  Collaboration among researchers is becoming increasingly common, which raises
a large number of scientometrics questions for which there is not a clear and
generally accepted answer. For instance, what value should be given to a
two-author or three-author publication with respect to a single-author
publication? This paper uses axiomatic analysis and proposes a practical method
to compute the expected value of an n-authors publication that takes into
consideration the added value induced by collaboration in contexts in which
there is no prior or ex-ante information about the publication's potential
merits or scientific impact. The only information required is the number of
authors. We compared the obtained theoretical values with the empirical values
based on a large dataset from the Web of Science database. We found that the
theoretical values are very close to the empirical values for some disciplines,
but not for all. This observation provides support in favor of the method
proposed in this paper. We expect that our findings can help researchers and
decision-makers to choose more effective and fair counting methods that take
into account the benefits of collaboration.
