Equal weights coauthorship sharing and the Shapley value are equivalent

•Shapley value is applied for publication credit allocation problem.•The equivalence of the Shapley and equal weights coauthorship sharing is proved.•Results are extended for heterogeneous scholars.

The publication credit allocation problem is one of the fundamental problems in bibliometrics. There are two solutions which do not use any additional information: equal weights measure and the Shapley value. The paper justifies the equal weights measure by showing equivalence with the Shapley value approach for sharing co-authors performance in specific games.