How does author name order work in your discipline?

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1. Elizabeth Dodson30 July 2010 at 02:35 PM

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   I've always understood UK convention to be the same across all disciplines except medicine - but then medics also strive to lose the title doctor as a sign of prestige!

2. Simon Smith30 July 2010 at 11:08 PM

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   My experience (in sociology, political sciences and European studies) has been of a very flexible / negotiable process. And it has varied according to the way a paper has been written. If there has been a lead author (i.e. someone who has taken responsibility for editing the paper, and who has effectively 'commissioned' sections of the paper from the co-authors) then they go first, and the others follow according to the same kind of rule of thumb you describe for computer science. But I've also co-written papers a different way - someone does a very rough first draft, and then the text can circulate several times between co-authors, who not only add new sections but edit and re-edit the whole thing (hopefully improving it each time!). At the end it's often unclear who's done the most work, so we've usually just gone for an alphabetical ordering of authors. I think it depends as much on the kind of people you work with as the subject area.

3. Matthew Salois31 July 2010 at 01:31 PM

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   Hi Hannah, that is a really funny comic, thanks for sharing. In economics, generally first author indicated the lead or the person with the greatest contribution (much like in your case). However, I have begun to see a lot of papers that have the last author's name footnoted as the "person to whom correspondance should be addressed." That to me makes a clear statement that the last author then did most of the work.

4. Sarah Davies02 August 2010 at 11:38 AM

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   Interesting - I hadn't realised there was so much diversity around this. My experience has been similar to Simon's - first author is the lead, unless names appear in alphabetical order (in which case there is often a note that 'These authors contributed equally to the article'). I'm generally happy with the alphabetical listing - but of course, my surname starts with 'D'...

5. Blanka Sengerová03 August 2010 at 01:57 PM

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   In the lab-based fields that I have been/am involved in, the order tends to be the first several authors those who have been involved in the actual experiments (PhD students, postdocs, undergrad project students...) and the last few authors those that are the grant-holders. The latter have been more or less instrumental in the writing of the paper. (Thus also the fact that often it is the last person who is the corresponding author - postdocs and PhD students move on, the grant-holder is likely is to remain and can provide plasmids, protocols, materials for those who may request them). In lab-based science it is more common to have more authors as there are plenty of projects that are started by somebody and may only lead to results several years down the line but the person who started them still needs to be included (in such a way I got a paper out of my MSc project that came out of the blue simply because I had made some mutant plasmids during my time in the lab). My hopefully-to-be-first-author-PhD-paper (now resubmitted with revisions, so fingers crossed) started off as a bit of 'needs further work doing' in author R's thesis that may be interesting. I (author B) took this on and expanded on it to make it one of my thesis chapters and submitted it as a paper with B first and R second, plus grant-holders at the end. The journal wanted quite a bit more work doing, which was done by authors C and J after I left the lab. So in the next submission, the order of authors became B, C, J, R - although R looses out it's fair as they only started the project and can be pleased that they still get a paper out of it. On this topic, my other half, when doing his PhD, was in a multi-university collaboration, where authorship order could have become a bit contentious as there were plenty of high-flying top-notch professors. So it was solved by alphabetical in the order of Universities, and then in the order of names. He was lucky enough to be in Cambridge with a surname beginning with C!! And finally slightly off topic, what have you done with publishing if you got married and changed your name? I have changed my name in normal life but am sticking with my maiden name in academic life to provide a continuity in my publishing record (Sengerova is a much less common name anyway), but wonder whether I'll keep on using that name if I move into an alternative career later on...

6. Rachel Talbot03 August 2010 at 05:04 PM

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   I decided to change my name as I felt I was early enough in my career to get away with a bit of confusion (which peaked at a conference I attended just after I got married where I presented my own paper in my maiden name and then they introduced me by my married name to do a poster presentation on behalf of a colleague!) . I don't know whether the name change will have a negative effect on my career - I have worked with a number of external partners under both names and have published at the same intitution both before and since the change so hopefully this will be minimal. What I hadn't realised was the number of different places I would have to change my name on the university systems and how long this would take. I naively thought these things would be updated directly from the HR record - appart from payroll it appears not... so 2 years on, I think I might just have found the last of the maiden name gremlins.

7. Andy Humphrey04 August 2010 at 01:30 PM

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   Name ordering on papers doesn't have a uniform convention, even within the sciences. It used to be that most chemistry journals listed the contributors in alphabetical order, whereas biochemistry journals listed authors in order of contribution to the paper. I think it had a lot to do with citation styles; the referencing in bioscience journals is far more likely to follow the Harvard convention (where a paper will be known as "Bloggs et al. (2010)" for short, with Bloggs being the first named author on the paper and usually assumed to be the principal author) whereas in chemistry journals the American Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry both have their own referencing conventions. The RSC's was always strictly alphabetical, for a long time. In UK-published journals this began to change with the Research Assessment Exercise. The RAE began on the assumption that all referencing used the Harvard style. This, of course, wasn't true, but as papers were now counted into the RAE if you were the first named author it led to some hearty rows across academia about who should be first named on all the papers. I still hear those rows today, periodically, particularly over whether it should be the scientist who did the work or the grant holder who won funding for the project (and often wrote up the results afterwards) who goes first on the paper. The result seems to be that referencing systems have relaxed somewhat. It's much more normal now, even in RSC journals, for the principal author to be named first and the grant holder (or the project leader, if it's a collaborative project) to be named last and marked as corresponding author.

8. Tennie Videler04 August 2010 at 10:59 PM

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   as the owner of a surname beginning with V I don't hold with alphabetical ordering at all.... I never took a married name (despite the temptation of moving up the alphabet with C), but caused my own confusion by publishing under Hortense (which is what Tennie is short for, geddit?) but not using my full name otherwise at all. I have found the whole author ordering a source of much frustration over the years. It is really hard to judge people’s contributions, especially in long projects such as Blanka describes, which have been the main ingredient of my research career. Human memory isn’t the greatest and was someone’s contribution at the start of a project any less because it was years ago? What is worth a higher (earlier) place in the list, a brilliant insight/ lucky break without which the publication wouldn’t have been possible or many months of hard slog without which the publication wouldn’t have been possible? Then there is the shared first author scenario- anyone else have experience with that? A great compromise, but still leads to ‘but I want to be first first author’ type rows as the paper will still be cited by the very first name.