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It is sometimes suggested that, in those branches of science where contributions to knowledge are published under multiple authorship, the listing of authors in alphabetical order affects the careers of those whose names begin with letters towards the end of the alphabet -an article by Brown, Jones and Williams will be cited as Brown et al., and so Williams' name will be less well known than Brown's. I have attempted to test this hypothesis in relation to chemistry in Britain -a field in which a relatively high proportion of contributions are published under multiple authorship. I first checked (by examining journals) that it is usual, though not an invariable rule, for authors to be listed alphabetically ; of 558 articles in a specimen volume of the Journal of the Chemical Society, 11% had a single author and 77% had two or more authors listed alphabetically, leaving 12% of articles having two or more authors who were not listed in strict alphabetical order. The lack of complete uniformity in the order of listing of authors implies that this was a matter of custom rather than editorial policy. The specimen volume (Vol. C, 1966) was chosen because it was published sufficiently long ago for the articles to have had time to affect the authors' careers.

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