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On average, consortium research had almost double (1.95) the world average citation impact on the log scale used (Mean Normalised Log Citation Score). At least partial alphabetical author ordering was the norm in most consortia. The 250 largest consortia were for nuclear physics and astronomy, involving expensive equipment, and for predominantly health-related issues in genomics, medicine, public health, microbiology and neuropsychology. For the health-related issues, except for the first and last few authors, authorship seem to primarily indicate contributions to the shared project infrastructure necessary to gather the raw data. It is impossible for research evaluators to identify the contributions of individual authors in the huge alphabetical consortia of physics and astronomy and problematic for the middle and end authors of health-related consortia. For small-scale evaluations, authorship contribution statements could be used when available. <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1162\/qss_a_00003","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,8,29]],"date-time":"2019-08-29T18:16:35Z","timestamp":1567102595000},"page":"290-302","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1162\/mitpressjournals.corrections.policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":25,"title":["Large publishing consortia produce higher citation impact research but coauthor contributions are hard to evaluate"],"prefix":"10.1162","volume":"1","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6065-205X","authenticated-orcid":true,"given":"Mike","family":"Thelwall","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK"}]}],"member":"281","reference":[{"issue":"8","key":"bib1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"818","DOI":"10.1158\/2159-8290.CD-17-0151","volume":"7","author":"AACR Project GENIE Consortium","year":"2017","journal-title":"Cancer Discovery"},{"issue":"10","key":"bib2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1045","DOI":"10.1038\/nbt1010-1045","volume":"28","author":"Bernstein B. 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