Name order patterns of graduate candidates and supervisors in Chinese publications: A case study of three major Chinese universities

Studying three Chinese major universities of different type, this article attempts to validate earlier results related to authors' name order in papers co-authored by graduate candidates and their supervisors. Candidates for the doctoral degree as well as the master's degree are considered. Defining the g-ratio as the fraction of co-authored publications where the graduate student's name precedes that of the supervisor's we obtain the following results. 1) Generally, master's level g-ratios are smaller than the corresponding doctoral level g-ratios. 2) The three doctoral g-ratio time series have a common characteristic: they tend to a limiting target value of somewhat more than 80%. The master's time series of the three universities extend themselves in parallel with the doctoral time series. 3) The g-ratio of collaborative papers related to the dissertation is higher than the g-ratio of collaborative papers not related to the dissertation. This is true on the doctoral level as well as on the master's level. 4) Different disciplines have different g-ratios, representing disciplinary customs in graduate candidate-supervisor collaboration, the highest g-ratio in the doctoral case occurring in biology (except for Tsinghua University that does not offer courses in biology). 5) There exist only small differences between the g-ratios of different kinds of universities. 6) In recent years, the same candidate-supervisor collaboration patterns exist in international publications as in domestic ones. The fact that the doctoral g-ratios of all three universities are as high as 80% reflects a universal regularity in the structure of scientific collaboration between doctoral candidates and their supervisors in China.