- The wordpress post is old, and so the author didn't have the chance to include my favorite method:
Every Author as First Author: (pdf) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.01393
- TFA touches on this, but one thing I initially found surprising is how few people understand different domains have different best practices around authorship order. It does make sense, people are typically not as involved in other domains and not exposed to those papers. But I do still find it surprising how different the practices can be overall.
- Kind of reminds me of the system we used in my band in the 90s: The person who brought the initial idea to the band gets to be first. After that, it was based on importance of contributions as determined by myself as the benign dictator, but if I contributed, my name always came last (unless I was the one who brought the idea to the band).
- Another idea is to only co-author with people with your last name, as in
"A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors" by Allen C. Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Lucas Goodman, and Sarena Goodman:
> We explore the phenomenon of coauthorship by economists who share a surname. Prior research has included at most three economist coauthors who share a surname. Ours is the first paper to have four economist coauthors who share a surname, as well as the first where such coauthors are unrelated by marriage, blood or current campus.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/joshuagoodman/files/goodma...
- My partner is a mathematician who realized (along with the other members of their working group) that if they were to deviate from the standard alphabetical authorship order, they could author a paper on the DILF Theorem.
- > the order of their authorship was determined by executing the following commands in R:
set.seed (7998976/5271)
x ‹- sample (c("Anne", "Peder"), 1)
print (paste ("The winner is", x, "!"))
But who picked the seed, Anne? And how do we know they didn’t have their thumb on the scale?
by MortyWaves
0 subcomment
- What surprising timing! I have started making a bookmarks page on my personal site and soon realised that any papers I linked to would need to deal with this. I couldn’t find a reliable answer so decided I would simply have authors listed in exactly the same order as found on the paper/site/wherever.
by Der_Einzige
1 subcomments
- You should in general prefer to give people as much credit as possible. in AI/ML we have the astrik of "equal contribution" which can be used to make N authors technically "first author".
- I once co-wrote a paper with a person who insisted on alphabetical order as a means of ensuring fairness.
Except his surname was Aaronson and mine starts with a P.
- I was once an author on a systems paper where everyone after the primary author was ordered by (decreasing) tenure on the development team.
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