Alphabetic order of authors in scholarly publications: a bibliometric study for 27 scientific fields
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Alphabetic order of authors in scholarly publications: a bibliometric study for 27 scientific fields João M. Fernandes1 · Paulo Cortez2 Received: 6 June 2020 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020
Abstract Paper authorship and author placement have significant consequences for accountability and assignment of credit. Moreover, authors in different scientific fields tend to follow dis‑ tinct approaches towards their ordering in scholarly publications. This manuscript presents a bibliometric study aiming to characterize the trends in the adoption of alphabetically ordered lists of authors in scholarly publications for 27 scientific fields. The study is sup‑ ported by two different datasets (with 83 and 32 thousand papers that have two or more authors) and uses two indicators that measure the degree of order of the authors list of a set of articles. The main results show that three fields (Economics; Mathematics; and Busi‑ ness, Management and Accounting) have a strong alphabetic ordering usage, while other five scientific areas present some tendency to use lists of authors in alphabetic order. Keywords Bibliometrics · Scientific authorship · Authors order · Scholarly publication
Introduction Whenever there are two or more authors, the authorship order becomes a relevant aspect of scholarly publications. This is becoming an increasingly pertinent issue, since diverse studies have shown a continuously increasing trend in the average number of authors per publication (Broad 1981; Grant 1989; Onwude et al. 1993; Persson et al. 2004; Greene 2007; Wuchty et al. 2007; Fernandes 2014; Henriksen 2016; Fernandes and Monteiro 2017). In some scientific fields, such as Medicine, authors seem to follow a relatively clear and known set of authorship rules that stipulate how to position their names in publications (Baerlocher et al. 2007). Moreover, there have been some suggestions on how to solve authorship issues, such as recommended by Strange (2008). Despite of
* João M. Fernandes [email protected] Paulo Cortez [email protected] 1
ALGORITMI Center, Department of Informatics, University of Minho, 4710‑057 Braga, Portugal
2
ALGORITMI Centre, Department of Information Systems, University of Minho, 4804‑533 Guimarães, Portugal
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Scientometrics
this, many authors still follow their own rules (thus ad hoc), although there are implicit rules that are often followed in practice and that are discussed in the next paragraphs. Typically, the first author is considered the main author, the one that contributed the most to the intellectual effort of the paper. As argued by Peidu (2019), the first author is clearly the one with the highest contribution or responsibility. When there are two or more co-authors that have contributed equally, it is becoming more common to indicate several “equal first authors” (Hu 2009). This can be applied, for instance, when several research teams collaborate. In such cases, the leaders of each team can assume the role of corresponding authors. Another implicit rule
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