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Alphabetical ordering of author surnames in academic publishing: A detriment to teamwork

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  • Steven T Joanis
  • Vivek H Patil

Abstract

Introduction: In academia, many institutions use journal article publication productivity for making decisions on tenure and promotion, funding grants, and rewarding stellar scholars. Although non-alphabetical sequencing of article coauthoring by the spelling of surnames signals the extent to which a scholar has contributed to a project, many disciplines in academia follow the norm of alphabetical ordering of coauthors in journal publications. By assessing business academic publications, this study investigates the hypothesis that author alphabetical ordering disincentivizes teamwork and reduces the overall quality of scholarship. Methods: To address our objectives, we accessed data from 21,353 articles published over a 20-year period across the four main business subdisciplines. The articles selected are all those published by the four highest-ranked journals (in each year) and four lower-ranked journals (in each year) for accounting, business technology, marketing, and organizational behavior. Poisson regression and binary logistic regression were utilized for hypothesis testing. Results: This study finds that, although team size among business scholars is increasing over time, alphabetical ordering as a convention in journal article publishing disincentivizes author teamwork. This disincentive results in fewer authors per publication than for publications using contribution-based ordering of authors. Importantly, article authoring teamwork is related to article quality. Specifically, articles written by a single author typically are of lesser quality than articles published by coauthors, but the number of coauthors exhibits decreasing returns to scale—coauthoring teams of one to three are positively related to high-quality articles, but larger teams are not. Alphabetical ordering itself, however, is positively associated with quality even though it inhibits teamwork, but journal article coauthoring has a greater impact on article quality than does alphabetical ordering. Conclusions: These findings have important implications for academia. Scholars respond to incentives, yet alphabetical ordering of journal article authors conflicts with what is beneficial for the progress of academic disciplines. Based on these findings, we recommend that, to drive the highest-quality research, teamwork should be incentivized—all fields should adopt a contribution-based journal article author-ordering convention and avoid author ordering based upon the spelling of surnames. Although this study was undertaken using articles from business journals, its findings should generalize across all academia.

Suggested Citation

  • Steven T Joanis & Vivek H Patil, 2021. "Alphabetical ordering of author surnames in academic publishing: A detriment to teamwork," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(5), pages 1-14, May.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0251176
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0251176
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Maxim Engers & Joshua S. Gans & Simon Grant & Stephen King, 1999. "First-Author Conditions," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 107(4), pages 859-883, August.
    2. Boris Maciejovsky & David V. Budescu & Dan Ariely, 2009. "—The Researcher as a Consumer of Scientific Publications: How Do Name-Ordering Conventions Affect Inferences About Contribution Credits?," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 28(3), pages 589-598, 05-06.
    3. Matthias Weber, 2018. "The effects of listing authors in alphabetical order: A review of the empirical evidence," Research Evaluation, Oxford University Press, vol. 27(3), pages 238-245.
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    1. Steven T. Joanis & Vivek H. Patil, 2022. "First-author gender differentials in business journal publishing: top journals versus the rest," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(2), pages 733-761, February.
    2. Kwon, Eunrang & Yun, Jinhyuk & Kang, Jeong-han, 2023. "The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on gendered research productivity and its correlates," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 17(1).
    3. Zhai, Li & Yan, Xiangbin, 2022. "A directed collaboration network for exploring the order of scientific collaboration," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(4).

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