The Authorship Dilemma: Alphabetical or Contribution?
Margareta Ackerman, Simina Brânzei · 2014
Academic communities have adopted different conventions for ordering authors on academic papers. Are these choices inconsequential, or can they significantly impact individual authors, or even communities at large? We consider a game theoretic model to study allocation of credit to authors; in particular, we find that alphabetical ordering can lead to higher research quality, while ordering by contribution results in a denser collaboration network and more papers.