Rating my co-authors

I feel like I’m something of a late-comer to the Rate My Co-author community (I include a link below, for completeness) and now feel like I should have joined earlier. It looks like one of these things whose user base reaches a critical mass, and then everyone has to join in. To be honest, I’m rather annoyed at how many of my co-authors seem to have claimed more than their fair share of the credit for various papers I worked with them on; now it seems I have to choose between making a counter-claim (and rely on Procaccia and Goldman’s fair division algorithms to moderate), or else enter into a costly dispute that may leave me worse off than if I just cave in and accept the lower share of credit. Their plan to integrate with Google scholar to produce the “world’s most accurate measure of an individual’s research contribution” is worrying. On the other hand, the fun aspect is seeing quite how many well-known papers seem to have dragged their authors into protracted disputes, to the extent that the authors end up with fewer “good co-author” points, than if only they had originally accepted a smaller share of the credit!

Anyway, the thing I like is the way you get to rate co-authors on about a dozen useful, but distinct skills. For example: Finding a fruitful line of research, Problem-solving, Being an optimist, Choosing a good venue, etc. There is clearly a big win to be had when it comes to team-building: we can now look up the skills of a potential research team, and check we’ve got everything covered. Previously I thought that Linkedin endorsements were the only available resource for this, but I admit to having been reluctant to endorsing my colleagues for (say) Latex skills, in case they take it the wrong way and demand endorsements for Algorithms, or Game theory.