A while back, I puzzled over the semantics and pragmatics of the sentence “The authors appear in alphabetical order”. Now, it is time to look at the sociology of alphabetical order in author listings. In a recent paper, Liran Einav and Leeat Yariv explore the issue:
In this paper, we focus on the effects of surname initials on professional outcomes in the academic labor market for economists.
We begin our analysis with data on faculty in all top 35 U.S. economics departments. Faculty with earlier surname initials are significantly more likely to receive tenure at top ten economics departments, are significantly more likely to become fellows of the Econometric Society, and, to a lesser extent, are more likely to receive the Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize. These statistically significant differences remain the same even after we control for country of origin, ethnicity, religion or departmental fixed effects. All these effects gradually fade as we increase the sample to include our entire set of top 35 departments.
We suspect the “alphabetical discrimination” reported in this paper is linked to the norm in the economics profession prescribing alphabetical ordering of credits on coauthored publications. As a test, we replicate our analysis for faculty in the top 35 U.S. psychology departments, for which coauthorships are not normatively ordered alphabetically. We find no relationship between alphabetical placement and tenure status in psychology.
We then discuss the extent to which the effects of alphabetical placement are internalized by potential authors in their choices of the number of coauthors as well as in their willingness to follow the alphabetical ordering norm. We find that the distribution of authors’ surnames in single-authored, double-authored and triple-authored papers does not differ significantly. Nonetheless, authors with surname initials that are placed later in the alphabet are significantly less likely to participate in four- and five-author projects. Furthermore, such authors are also more likely to deviate from the accepted norm, and to write papers in which credits do not follow the alphabetical ordering.
A short blurb in the Boston Globe added this coda: “Reaction to the article has been mixed-and not randomly mixed. ‘You definitely see a correlation between how much they believe the article and how late in the alphabet they appear,’ says Einav. Jeffrey Zabel, an economist at Tufts, deems the results ‘persuasive.’ The chair of Harvard’s department, Alberto Alesina, said he had not read the paper, so he couldn’t comment. Hmm.”
I found an older paper — not cited by Einav and Yariv –, which reports on a similar study of British chemists and found no such effect.
I myself have, of course, been very careful in my choice of friends and co-authors so that I always appear first in the listing. (Here, it is crucial that my name is alphabetized under “F”). The only reason why I might consider a collaborator who precedes me in the alphabet is if the collaboration would lower my Erdös number, which is 7 right now, or my Bacon-Erdös number, which is infinity right now.
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This entry was posted by fintel on Wednesday, August 9th, 2006, at 4:07 am.
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