Citation Counts of Multi-Authored Papers — First-named Authors and Further Authors

To examine whether primary-citation indexing can be taken as an unbiased representation of all-author indexing, we compared the cited first-author counts (straight counts) with the cited all-author counts (complete counts)in two psychological journals over two publication years. Although rather high correlations were found between straight counts and complete counts, correlations differ with journals of the same discipline, with different publication years of the same journal, and according to seniority of cited authors. No effect of alphabetical name ordering was found. Results are discussed against the background of the possible use of weighting procedures for all-author indexing.