The only shortcoming is that they currently use opacity even if there is only one author. In that case, it would seem natural to render the text as-is.
TFA touches on this, but one thing I initially found surprising is how few people understand different domains have different best practices around authorship order. It does make sense, people are typically not as involved in other domains and not exposed to those papers. But I do still find it surprising how different the practices can be overall.
The American Mathematical Society has a statement basically saying “in math, authorship order is alphabetical” that people going up for tenure can put in their files, in case people involved in the decision come from other disciplines which have other conventions.
Alphabetical order sounds interesting when you mix non-anglicized international names. Do you go by Unicode sort order?
I’m in physics, we have this thing where the first author did the most and the last author supervised the most, and the person in the middle just had an occasional coffee with them.
I’d guess it’d be a particular collation, rather than Unicode order…otherwise ö would always come after z (which is incorrect for English, but correct for, e.g., Swedish).
Kind of reminds me of the system we used in my band in the 90s: The person who brought the initial idea to the band gets to be first. After that, it was based on importance of contributions as determined by myself as the benign dictator, but if I contributed, my name always came last (unless I was the one who brought the idea to the band).
This is exactly how most professors and managers do it. Unless they themselves do the majority of the writing they are last by convention so it actually has some prestige to be last.
What you don't want is second-to-last on a paper w 4 or more authors. That's the worst.
Another idea is to only co-author with people with your last name, as in
"A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors" by Allen C. Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Lucas Goodman, and Sarena Goodman:
> We explore the phenomenon of coauthorship by economists who share a surname. Prior research has included at most three economist coauthors who share a surname. Ours is the first paper to have four economist coauthors who share a surname, as well as the first where such coauthors are unrelated by marriage, blood or current campus.
My partner is a mathematician who realized (along with the other members of their working group) that if they were to deviate from the standard alphabetical authorship order, they could author a paper on the DILF Theorem.
That is weird; from what I understand (not an R expert), set.seed takes an integer, so I assume that number gets truncated / approximated to an integer. That means that all nearby seeds give the same result: for instance changing 7998976 to 7998977 or 7998975 makes no difference, up to the next multiple of 5271. This makes the result look a lot less random. Was Anne cheating?
What surprising timing! I have started making a bookmarks page on my personal site and soon realised that any papers I linked to would need to deal with this. I couldn’t find a reliable answer so decided I would simply have authors listed in exactly the same order as found on the paper/site/wherever.
You should in general prefer to give people as much credit as possible. in AI/ML we have the astrik of "equal contribution" which can be used to make N authors technically "first author".
Yes but you'd still cite the paper as "as shown in FirstFirstAuthor et al (2024)" which rather defeats the purpose. And citing as "FirstFirstAuthor and SecondFirstAuthor and [...] et al" is both impractical and petty.
Which is what caused the whole "race to first authorship" mentality in the first place.
Every Author as First Author: (pdf) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.01393
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