Abstract
Paper authorship and author placement have significant consequences for accountability and assignment of credit. Moreover, authors in different scientific fields tend to follow distinct 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 supported 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 Business, 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.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020. We would like to thank Rui Mendes (from U. Minho) for the initial version of the Python program that was used to automatically calculate the various metrics for our datasets. We also acknowledge Jorge Sousa Pinto and José Nuno Oliveira (from U. Minho) for discussions on how to measure the order degree of a list. We thank the anonymous reviewers for the insightful comments that helped improving the contents of the manuscript.
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J. M. Fernandes performed the conceptualization, methodology, software, investigation, resources, formal analysis, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing. P. Cortez contributed with methodology, validation, formal analysis, writing—review and editing, and visualization.
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Fernandes, J.M., Cortez, P. Alphabetic order of authors in scholarly publications: a bibliometric study for 27 scientific fields. Scientometrics 125, 2773–2792 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03686-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03686-0