  The rising trend of coauthored academic works obscures the credit assignment
that is the basis for decisions of funding and career advancements. In this
paper, a simple model based on the assumption of an unvarying "author ability"
is introduced. With this assumption, the weight of author contributions to a
body of coauthored work can be statistically estimated. The method is tested on
a set of some more than five-hundred authors in a coauthor network from the
CiteSeerX database. The ranking obtained agrees fairly well with that given by
total fractional citation counts for an author, but noticeable differences
exist.
