Alphabetic or Contributor Author Order. What Is the Norm in Danish Economics and Political Science and Why?

Abstract

Researchers have different ways of deciding on the author order, and how they do it often depends on the culture of their field. Some fields are well known for using alphabetic author order, while others put a great emphasis on the meaning of the author order and place authors according to contribution. This article is the first to use mixed method to examine the extent of alphabetic author order and to examine why researchers adopt a certain author order norm in the fields of economics and political science. The article finds that alphabetic authorship has been and is the norm in economics, while some tendency towards it exists in political science. The differences in the intellectual and social organization of the fields seem to be a factor in the extent that these researchers will adopt a certain norm. Furthermore, the increasing number of authors per article and the publish‐or‐perish culture seems to put pressure on the alphabetic norm because it creates greater attention to the reputational advantages of being first‐author.

Female citation impact superiority 1996–2018 in six out of seven English‐speaking nations

“…The first author of each paper was assumed to be the main contributor in all cases. Whilst this is true in general in all broad fields (Larivière, Desrochers, Macaluso, Mongeon, Paul-Hus, & Sugimoto, 2016; see also : Yang, Wolfram, & Wang, 2017), alphabetical authorship occurs to some extent in some narrow fields and may even be the norm in some (Henriksen, 2019;Waltman, 2012). In cases of alphabetical authorship with n authors, the main author has a 1/n chance of being listed first by accident and (depending on the gender composition of the field and the gender of the first author) may have the same gender as the first author if not.…”

On the lack of women researchers in the Middle East & North Africa

“…To address seniority and leadership in scientific output, we focused specifically on the first and last author of a publication. In most fields, when a researcher is the first or last author on a publication, it is more likely that the author had a central role in the research project in terms of execution, guidance, management or funding (González-Alcaide et al, 2017;Henriksen, 2019).…”

“…To address seniority and leadership in scienti c output, we focused speci cally on the rst and last author of a publication. In most elds, when a researcher is the rst or last author on a publication, it is more likely that the author had a central role in the research project in terms of execution, guidance, management or funding (González-Alcaide et al, 2017;Henriksen, 2019). The rst author of a publication often represents the most important contributor (Larivière et al, 2016), that is the one who conducted the majority of the authorship tasks.…”

Alphabetized Co-Authorship in Economics Reconsidered

“…The example of some elite journals commonly referred to as the top 5 (Card and DellaV-1 See also Henriksen (2019) for a case study for Danish economists.…”