  Large, multi-institutional groups or collaborations of scientists are engaged
in nuclear physics research projects, and the number of research facilities is
dwindling. These collaborations have their own authorship rules, and they
produce a large number of highly-cited papers. Multiple authorship of nuclear
physics publications creates a problem with the assessment of an individual
author's productivity relative to his/her colleagues and renders ineffective a
performance metrics solely based on annual publication and citation counts.
Many institutions are increasingly relying on the total number of first-author
papers; however, this approach becomes counterproductive for large research
collaborations with an alphabetical order of authors. A concept of fractional
authorship (the claiming of credit for authorship by more than one individual)
helps to clarify this issue by providing a more complete picture of research
activities. In the present work, nuclear physics fractional and total
authorships have been investigated using nuclear data mining techniques.
Historic total and fractional authorship averages have been extracted from the
Nuclear Science References (NSR) database, and the current range of fractional
contributions has been deduced. The results of this study and their
implications are discussed and conclusions presented.
