Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fun ways of deciding authorship order (2016)

dynamicecology.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–37 of 37 posts

Re: Fun ways of deciding authorship order (2016)

#31

Post by setopt »

madcaptenor wrote: post #3
jghn wrote: post #2

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.

The American Mathematical Society has a statement basically saying “in math, authorship order is alphabetical” that people going up for tenure can put in their files, in case people involved in the decision come from other disciplines which have other conventions. https://www.ams.org/learning-careers/leaders/CultureStatemen...

Alphabetical order sounds interesting when you mix non-anglicized international names. Do you go by Unicode sort order?

I’m in physics, we have this thing where the first author did the most and the last author supervised the most, and the person in the middle just had an occasional coffee with them.

Re: Fun ways of deciding authorship order (2016)

#32

Post by Wevah »

setopt wrote: post #31
madcaptenor wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American Mathematical Society has a statement basically saying “in math, authorship order is alphabetical” that people going up for tenure can put in their files, in case people involved in the decision come from other disciplines which have other conventions. https://www.ams.org/learning-careers/leaders/CultureStatemen...

Alphabetical order sounds interesting when you mix non-anglicized international names. Do you go by Unicode sort order? I’m in physics, we have this thing where the first author did the most and the last author supervised the most, and the person in the middle just had an occasional coffee with them.

I’d guess it’d be a particular collation, rather than Unicode order…otherwise ö would always come after z (which is incorrect for English, but correct for, e.g., Swedish).

Re: Fun ways of deciding authorship order (2016)

#33

Post by rendaw »

madcaptenor wrote: post #7
jpmattia wrote: post #4

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

This is biased in favor of authors with long names (which they mention at the beginning of their Future Work section)

That's addressed in "Future work"!

Re: Fun ways of deciding authorship order (2016)

#34

Post by thaumasiotes »

Wevah wrote: post #32
setopt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alphabetical order sounds interesting when you mix non-anglicized international names. Do you go by Unicode sort order? I’m in physics, we have this thing where the first author did the most and the last author supervised the most, and the person in the middle just had an occasional coffee with them.

I’d guess it’d be a particular collation, rather than Unicode order…otherwise ö would always come after z (which is incorrect for English, but correct for, e.g., Swedish).

> otherwise ö would always come after z

Really? Wouldn't that depend on how you spelled it and what kind of Unicode ordering you specified?

Which comes first?

    '\u0047\u00f6\u0064\u0065\u006c'
    '\u0047\u006f\u0308\u0064\u0065\u006c'

Re: Fun ways of deciding authorship order (2016)

#35

Post by tpoacher »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #27

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".

Yes but you'd still cite the paper as "as shown in FirstFirstAuthor et al (2024)" which rather defeats the purpose. And citing as "FirstFirstAuthor and SecondFirstAuthor and [...] et al" is both impractical and petty.

Which is what caused the whole "race to first authorship" mentality in the first place.

Re: Fun ways of deciding authorship order (2016)

#37

Post by Der_Einzige »

tpoacher wrote: post #35
Der_Einzige wrote: post #27

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".

Yes but you'd still cite the paper as "as shown in FirstFirstAuthor et al (2024)" which rather defeats the purpose. And citing as "FirstFirstAuthor and SecondFirstAuthor and [...] et al" is both impractical and petty. Which is what caused the whole "race to first authorship" mentality in the first place.

No, you cite the very first author only. The "multiple first author" stuff is for when you talk about your paper to others.
Post reply on HN