The authorship dilemma: alphabetical or contribution?

Ackerman, Margareta; Brânzei, Simina

doi:10.1007/s10458-016-9351-7

Cited by 12 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Previous research of author order often focused on the extent of alphabetic author order (Frandsen & Nicolaisen, 2010;Waltman, 2012), or why it makes sense according to game theory (Ackerman & Branzei, 2017;Engers et al, 1999). This article is the first to apply mixed methods to examine the extent of alphabetic authorship in economics and political science and to explore why researchers use alphabetic author order.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The arguments above for using either alphabetic or contribution order reflect the research and collaboration culture in the different research fields. However, previous studies of authorship order norms in economics and political science are either quantitative (Efthyvoulou, ; Waltman, ; Weber, ) or theoretically based (Ackerman & Branzei, ; Engers et al, ). Thus, none of the previous studies investigate why social scientists adopt a certain authorship‐ordering norm.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Alphabetic or Contributor Author Order. What Is the Norm in Danish Economics and Political Science and Why?

Henriksen

2019

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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Researchers have different ways of deciding on the author order, and how they do it often depends on the culture of their field. Some fields are well known for using alphabetic author order, while others put a great emphasis on the meaning of the author order and place authors according to contribution. This article is the first to use mixed method to examine the extent of alphabetic author order and to examine why researchers adopt a certain author order norm in the fields of economics and political science. The article finds that alphabetic authorship has been and is the norm in economics, while some tendency towards it exists in political science. The differences in the intellectual and social organization of the fields seem to be a factor in the extent that these researchers will adopt a certain norm. Furthermore, the increasing number of authors per article and the publish‐or‐perish culture seems to put pressure on the alphabetic norm because it creates greater attention to the reputational advantages of being first‐author.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Alphabetic or Contributor Author Order. What Is the Norm in Danish Economics and Political Science and Why?

Henriksen

2019

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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“…A key driver of success is teamwork [16][17][18][19], which should lead to higher-quality work. Prior literature has suggested that the quality of articles-as reflected by the ranking of journals in which they are published-is related to author ordering conventions (e.g., [7,20,21]). The contention this stream of literature makes is that the greater stringency with which papers are accepted in higher-ranked publication outlets forces coauthors to perform at their best.…”

Section: Hypotheses Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Alphabetical ordering of author surnames in academic publishing: A detriment to teamwork

Joanis

Patil

2021

PLoS ONE

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Introduction In academia, many institutions use journal article publication productivity for making decisions on tenure and promotion, funding grants, and rewarding stellar scholars. Although non-alphabetical sequencing of article coauthoring by the spelling of surnames signals the extent to which a scholar has contributed to a project, many disciplines in academia follow the norm of alphabetical ordering of coauthors in journal publications. By assessing business academic publications, this study investigates the hypothesis that author alphabetical ordering disincentivizes teamwork and reduces the overall quality of scholarship. Methods To address our objectives, we accessed data from 21,353 articles published over a 20-year period across the four main business subdisciplines. The articles selected are all those published by the four highest-ranked journals (in each year) and four lower-ranked journals (in each year) for accounting, business technology, marketing, and organizational behavior. Poisson regression and binary logistic regression were utilized for hypothesis testing. Results This study finds that, although team size among business scholars is increasing over time, alphabetical ordering as a convention in journal article publishing disincentivizes author teamwork. This disincentive results in fewer authors per publication than for publications using contribution-based ordering of authors. Importantly, article authoring teamwork is related to article quality. Specifically, articles written by a single author typically are of lesser quality than articles published by coauthors, but the number of coauthors exhibits decreasing returns to scale—coauthoring teams of one to three are positively related to high-quality articles, but larger teams are not. Alphabetical ordering itself, however, is positively associated with quality even though it inhibits teamwork, but journal article coauthoring has a greater impact on article quality than does alphabetical ordering. Conclusions These findings have important implications for academia. Scholars respond to incentives, yet alphabetical ordering of journal article authors conflicts with what is beneficial for the progress of academic disciplines. Based on these findings, we recommend that, to drive the highest-quality research, teamwork should be incentivized—all fields should adopt a contribution-based journal article author-ordering convention and avoid author ordering based upon the spelling of surnames. Although this study was undertaken using articles from business journals, its findings should generalize across all academia.

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“…These can be credited as "clinical researchers" or "participating researchers" whose function or contribution can be explained in several ways: "provided scientific advice"; "critically reviewed the study protocol"; "processed samples"; "recorded information"; or "assisted patients (or participants) in this research." In order to avoid confusion or misunderstanding, written authorization to be included in the acknowledgments must be requested from all such participants 17,22 .…”

Section: Who Should Be Included In the Acknowledgments?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Importancia, definición y conflictos de la autoría en publicaciones científicas

Gunturiz

Castro

Chaparro³

2020

Rev. Bioét.

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Resumen Definir la autoría en artículos y documentos científicos es un proceso esencial y complejo, que encierra subjetividad y depende de convenios establecidos en general de palabra, lo que puede ocasionar conflictos entre los investigadores. Se han publicado algunas guías con lineamientos generales para mejorar esta práctica, sin embargo son pocos los procedimientos cuantitativos para precisar autoría y coautoría de un escrito científico, y no hay consenso para definir los autores y el orden en que deben aparecer. Con este artículo intentamos rescatar algunos criterios y consideraciones para determinar el listado de autores en textos científicos.

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The authorship dilemma: alphabetical or contribution?

Cited by 12 publications

References 19 publications

Alphabetic or Contributor Author Order. What Is the Norm in Danish Economics and Political Science and Why?

Alphabetic or Contributor Author Order. What Is the Norm in Danish Economics and Political Science and Why?

Alphabetical ordering of author surnames in academic publishing: A detriment to teamwork

Importancia, definición y conflictos de la autoría en publicaciones científicas

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