Order of authors

The order in which the authors of an academic paper are listed is a perpetual source of trouble, partly since the approved order various between disciplines, so the contribution of authors of interdisciplinary papers is likely to be misunderstood.

In some areas, authors are ordered by the relative importance of their contributions. This leads to comparing apples and chalk: how do you rate the person who had the idea against the student who did all the hard work carrying it out?

Sometimes the order has a coded significance known only to insiders, e.g. the last-named author is the director of the lab. (If you do this, take care: remember what happened to Elena Ceaucescu, director of the Romanian chemistry institute, and incidentally wife of the dictator of Romania.)

In mathematics we almost always use alphabetical order. But this is tough on people whose name begins with a letter late in the alphabet. My former colleague Rob Wilson lists the authors of the Online Atlas of Finite Group Representations in reverse alphabetical order, so that he can be first for a change.

Now, in a recent arXiv preprint (2304.01393), Erik and Martin Demaine discuss a solution to this problem: superimpose the authors’ names!

Read their paper: it gives a beautiful account of the philosophy and mechanism of their method, including LaTeX code to format a BibTeX entry in this way.

Do take a look.