8 thoughts on “2022”

1. Regarding authorship, what are the rules for ordering the names? That is, what fields of endeavor or particular journals specify alphabetical order, primary author first, primary author last or some other sequence that I am unable to imagine? For example, Metropolis receives the naming rights because he was the first author of the famous paper. Ditto Pontryagin and the maximal principle of control theory.
   Within a particular discipline, is the ordering well known and enforced? What does one learn (if anything) by reading the tea leaves of the ordering?

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   • Paul:

     It depends on the field.

     In econ the norm is alphabetical order, but they don’t always do it that way. Also econ seems to have a tradition of single-authored articles, where many of the people who did the work are just listed in the acknowledgements but not as authors (see discussion here). In the natural sciences, it seems more standard to include everyone as authors, including the people who collected and analyzed the data, the people who built the equipment, etc.

     In statistics, or at least in my own collaborations, the first author is the person who wrote the article, the second person is the person who did the second-most, etc. Sometimes we follow the traditional science rule that the head of the laboratory is last author, but we don’t always do that. In the very first article listed above, I think the five of us contributed equally, but maybe Tamara was the one to unify all our contributions into a single article. In the second article listed above, Bob had the original idea and then Lu took it and changed it enough so it was really her idea, and Aki and I made some contributions. And so on. Each article has its own story.

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     • Listing in alphabetical order has a specific advantage in that it leads to ambiguity, thus avoiding future fights when Nobel Prizes in physics are being awarded. Not in alphabetical order sort of implies that the first author is in fact more important because the convenient ambiguity of the alphabet has been overridden. Unfortunately, along with difficulties of umlauts in various languages, in Norwegian, “aa” is actually the last letter of the alphabet as it decidedly is not in English.

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   • In most of computer science its student authors first, and faculty who originated the idea/did the most overseeing/funded last. I’m last author on some papers that I wrote the majority of. But people in industry labs seem to do it differently, where closer to front matters more. And when you have a faculty lead author, but also students and other faculty on a paper, it gets confusing how to read the order of the rest and I’m not sure there’s any single convention.

     I used to find all of this frustrating, since supposedly there is evidence from other fields of women who co-author with men getting less credit for that work than for work co-authored with only other women. It’s probably part of why I’ve continued to write first author papers even though its not necessarily so common in CS after becoming faculty.

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2. Just before wishing all of us, “Happy new year, everyone!,” Andrew lists his collaborators by first name only, except for “Andrew Gelman” who comes between “Aaron” and “Ignazio.” As has long been suspected, Andrew is not an individual but a conglomerate instead.

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   • Oops! That was a copy-paste error. Thanks for reading so carefully!

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3. > As has long been suspected, Andrew is not an individual but a conglomerate instead.

   That would explain his ridiculous productivity.

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4. is the one in ppnas any good?

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