We are increasingly getting requests to handle cases where multiple authors are sharing "first authorship", and there's a need to be able to do rank searches rather than position searches. We need a field for each contributor type that holds information about author rank, separate from author position:
- For a paper by "A. Andersen, B. Bailey, C. Carson, D. Dillon" where Anderson and Bailey have joint first authorship,
- "Position" would still be the order in which they appear in the author list, [1,2,3,4]
- "Rank" would be [1,1,3,4]
We are increasingly getting requests to handle cases where multiple authors are sharing "first authorship", and there's a need to be able to do rank searches rather than position searches. We need a field for each contributor type that holds information about author rank, separate from author position: