Intellectual collaboration

Intellectual collaboration in science includes formal coauthorship as well as presentation of papers at workshops, seminars, and professional meetings and informal commentary from colleagues, journal referees, and editors. While the incidence and extent of formal coauthorship are greater in biology than in economics, the extent of intellectual collaboration is greater in economics than in biology. Intellectual property rights to coauthored papers in economics tend to be assigned alphabetically, whereas biology is characterized by a strong merit-based (nonalphabetical) assignment of intellectual property rights. These patterns do not result from differences in the relative importance of funding/physical capital.