Fun ways of deciding authorship order (2016)
30 comments
·April 15, 2025jpmattia
madcaptenor
This is biased in favor of authors with long names (which they mention at the beginning of their Future Work section)
JohnKemeny
Extra funny, considering it's written by Demaine and Demaine.
Etheryte
The only shortcoming is that they currently use opacity even if there is only one author. In that case, it would seem natural to render the text as-is.
MortyWaves
Why does it contain half-redacted words?
maartin0
They're not redacted. If you zoom in you'll just see a very large number of stacked names which is ironic (I thought the same for a second)
jghn
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.
madcaptenor
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...
setopt
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.
setgree
Another idea is to only co-author with people with your last name, as in "A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors" by Allen C. Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Lucas Goodman, and Sarena Goodman:
> We explore the phenomenon of coauthorship by economists who share a surname. Prior research has included at most three economist coauthors who share a surname. Ours is the first paper to have four economist coauthors who share a surname, as well as the first where such coauthors are unrelated by marriage, blood or current campus.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/joshuagoodman/files/goodma...
dhosek
Kind of reminds me of the system we used in my band in the 90s: The person who brought the initial idea to the band gets to be first. After that, it was based on importance of contributions as determined by myself as the benign dictator, but if I contributed, my name always came last (unless I was the one who brought the idea to the band).
jvanderbot
This is exactly how most professors and managers do it. Unless they themselves do the majority of the writing they are last by convention so it actually has some prestige to be last.
What you don't want is second-to-last on a paper w 4 or more authors. That's the worst.
bix6
This is the method I use at work, feels right, puts the team first.
dfltr
My partner is a mathematician who realized (along with the other members of their working group) that if they were to deviate from the standard alphabetical authorship order, they could author a paper on the DILF Theorem.
setopt
Sounds like they’re on track for a FILD medal with that paper.
null
hinkley
> the order of their authorship was determined by executing the following commands in R:
set.seed (7998976/5271)
x ‹- sample (c("Anne", "Peder"), 1)
print (paste ("The winner is", x, "!"))
zvorygin
My guess is that each simultaneously picked a number, one for numerator and one for denominator.
hinkley
Hopefully. Though I wonder if that can be gamed if you pick the denominator and the value is rounded. Eg a large prime.
fph
That is weird; from what I understand (not an R expert), set.seed takes an integer, so I assume that number gets truncated / approximated to an integer. That means that all nearby seeds give the same result: for instance changing 7998976 to 7998977 or 7998975 makes no difference, up to the next multiple of 5271. This makes the result look a lot less random. Was Anne cheating?
madcaptenor
From the documentation at https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/base/html/Rand..., seed is "a single value, interpreted as an integer, or NULL (see ‘Details’)." From some quick testing it appears that "interpreted" means "truncated".
madcaptenor
I was wondering if this number was somehow significant in the paper, but it doesn't seem to be: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/251524591877096...
a_e_k
I was once an author on a systems paper where everyone after the primary author was ordered by (decreasing) tenure on the development team.
MortyWaves
What surprising timing! I have started making a bookmarks page on my personal site and soon realised that any papers I linked to would need to deal with this. I couldn’t find a reliable answer so decided I would simply have authors listed in exactly the same order as found on the paper/site/wherever.
null
Der_Einzige
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".
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