Alphabetic order of authors in scholarly publications: a bibliometric study for 27 scientific fields

Abstract

Paper authorship and author placement have significant consequences for accountability and assignment of credit. Moreover, authors in different scientific fields tend to follow distinct approaches towards their ordering in scholarly publications. This manuscript presents a bibliometric study aiming to characterize the trends in the adoption of alphabetically ordered lists of authors in scholarly publications for 27 scientific fields. The study is supported by two different datasets (with 83 and 32 thousand papers that have two or more authors) and uses two indicators that measure the degree of order of the authors list of a set of articles. The main results show that three fields (Economics; Mathematics; and Business, Management and Accounting) have a strong alphabetic ordering usage, while other five scientific areas present some tendency to use lists of authors in alphabetic order.