If you want to achieve anything in science, you must get your work published work in scientific journals. Once that’s done, you have to wait for your fellow scientists to cite it. Now that bosses and directors are starting to a closer look at citations, the order in which authors are named in a joint publication is becoming increasingly important: the general rule is that either the first or the last author to be named is the most important. In the journal Informetrics, bibliometrist Ludo Waltman describes how the custom to list the authors in alphabetical order is dying out. Having made a study of papers published in 2011, he observed that less than four per cent used alphabetical order, against 8.9 per cent in 1981. However, when large groups of people collaborate on a paper, as happens in genetics or particle physics, the authors are more and more frequently listed alphabetically once the main authors have been named.
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Wednesday 26 September 2012