  Measuring publication success of a researcher is a complicated task as
publications are often co-authored by multiple authors, and so, require
comparison of solo publications with joint publications. In this paper, like
\cite{price1981multiple}, we argue for an egalitarian perspective in
accomplishing this task.
  More specifically, we justify the need for an ethical perspective in
quantifying academic author by identifying certain ethical difficulties of some
popular contemporary indices used for this purpose. And then we show that for
any given dataset of research papers, the unique method satisfying the ethical
notions of {\it identity independence} and performance invariance must be the
egaliatarian E-index proposed by \cite{bps} and \cite{price1981multiple}. In
our setting, this egalitarian method divides authorship of joint projects
equally among authors and sums across all publications of each author.
