Alphabetized Co-Authorship in Economics Reconsidered

Abstract

In this article, we revisit the analysis of Laband and Tollison (2006) who documented that articles with two authors in alphabetical order are cited much more often than nonalphabetized papers with two authors in the American Economic Review and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. Using more than 120,000 multi-authored articles from the Web of Science economics subject category, we demonstrate first that the alphabetization rate in economics has declined somewhat over the last decade. Second, we find no statistically significant relationship between alphabetized co-authorship and citations in economics (the coefficients are very small). Third, we show that the likelihood of non-alphabetized co-authorship increases the more authors an article has.