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In other areas of computer science, first author counts for a lot. It indicates a person did the majority of the implementation work, probably wrote the first d

In other areas of computer science, first author counts for a lot. It indicates a person did the majority of the implementation work, probably wrote the first draft of the paper, etc. Typically the last author is the PI that came up with the idea, mentored the first author, and funded the work. The contributions of those in the middle are less well defined. In CS theory (and math), they go by alphabetical author order, so none of the aforementioned rules work unless there is only a single author. So, I excluded the theory folks from the first author analysis.

nopinsight 9y ago
Thank you for the explanation!
lbeltrame 9y ago
This is true in life sciences as well although IIRC this is more of a tradition than something written and defined.
raister 9y ago
This is changing, thankfully. First authors should be the ones leading the paper, according to contributions. Some journals are asking for the actual contributions performed by each author, which I think is very good. Alphabetical order should be banned, period.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  You state your opinion, but don't justify it -- could you share why you think it is important we list first author by contribution? What does this accomplish? Obviously not everyone agrees (or you wouldn't have felt the need to post), so why not share why you think you're right, so we can discuss the issue? Edit: Well, we've proven that people feel very strongly about this, but I'm no closer to understanding why people care so much about it. (ie, what they think it accomplishes.) C'est la Internet, I suppose.
  - foo101 9y ago
    I don't publish papers, so I don't have a strong opinion about it. But like you, I am genuinely curious why alphabetical order was chosen as the convention rather than the amount of contributions (like GitHub does[1]). If the answer is that contributions to scientific papers can be very fuzzy, e.g. it is hard to determine which contribution is more important than others, then I agree alphabetical order makes sense. But is it really so in most of the papers? For example, in the RSA paper, Adleman clearly knew his contribution was less than Rivest and Shamir and he insisted that he put his name in the end. I believe, in most papers it would be obvious to the co-authors that someone's contribution is more significant than the others. If this is true, why do they still choose to follow the alphabetical order convention rather than the contribution order convention? [1]: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/graphs/contributors https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/graphs/contributors (example)
    - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
      > If the answer is that contributions to scientific papers can be very fuzzy, e.g. it is hard to determine which contribution is more important than others, then I agree alphabetical order makes sense. But is it really so in most of the papers? I'm probably biased from being in industry, but even when people contribute unequal code to a module or writing in a report, we just list the authors alphabetically because it's obnoxious to do anything with the list otherwise and it stops a huge amount of politicking when the first three out of ten authors contribute equal amounts. At the end of the day, stable collaborations will outpace individual contributors -- so we should focus on what allows us to openly collaborate and tears down barriers to doing that. But from my point of view, we have a lot of the same incentives between industry and academia: 1. If you want to get promoted, you need projects associated with you and to get noticed. 2. There needs to be some method to decide who gets what amount of bonuses. 3. Funding allocation is tied to past successes. ...and probably some more I'm forgetting. So I think my experience isn't totally irrelevant -- you get enough signal out of the distribution of the person's name that the loss of whatever from not getting "first" information is eclipsed by the gains from less politics (and if you have a lot of documents, easier parsing). Again, perhaps it's the industry talking, but I'd rather hire an author that contributed the third most to a large number of papers than someone who contributed first most to a few. One of them seems to be a "force multiplier" in that they're keeping several other ICs moving (and contributing on all those efforts), while one guy just seems a specialist in a particular work. I don't think removing the "first" signal harms my ability to find those "force multipliers", because they'll still have the same markers (as they weren't showing up first under the other system anyway). So perhaps I simply have different uses for the rankings than people who feel differently?
- wbl 9y ago
  Littlewood and Hardy disagree. Ranking/attributing contributions to a joint paper in mathematics is very hard especially when the results grow out of conversations between all of the authors.
ansgri 9y ago
In this case, being the last author should matter more. As in, you have a number of first-author publications to prove you can do research yourself, then start publishing as the last author with different first authors, to show you're into management now and can train new first authors. As an old Russian saying goes, 'a great engineer would never be promoted'.

nopinsight 9y ago

Thank you for the explanation!

lbeltrame 9y ago

This is true in life sciences as well although IIRC this is more of a tradition than something written and defined.

raister 9y ago

This is changing, thankfully. First authors should be the ones leading the paper, according to contributions. Some journals are asking for the actual contributions performed by each author, which I think is very good. Alphabetical order should be banned, period.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
You state your opinion, but don't justify it -- could you share why you think it is important we list first author by contribution? What does this accomplish? Obviously not everyone agrees (or you wouldn't have felt the need to post), so why not share why you think you're right, so we can discuss the issue? Edit: Well, we've proven that people feel very strongly about this, but I'm no closer to understanding why people care so much about it. (ie, what they think it accomplishes.) C'est la Internet, I suppose.
- foo101 9y ago
  I don't publish papers, so I don't have a strong opinion about it. But like you, I am genuinely curious why alphabetical order was chosen as the convention rather than the amount of contributions (like GitHub does[1]). If the answer is that contributions to scientific papers can be very fuzzy, e.g. it is hard to determine which contribution is more important than others, then I agree alphabetical order makes sense. But is it really so in most of the papers? For example, in the RSA paper, Adleman clearly knew his contribution was less than Rivest and Shamir and he insisted that he put his name in the end. I believe, in most papers it would be obvious to the co-authors that someone's contribution is more significant than the others. If this is true, why do they still choose to follow the alphabetical order convention rather than the contribution order convention? [1]: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/graphs/contributors https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/graphs/contributors (example)
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    > If the answer is that contributions to scientific papers can be very fuzzy, e.g. it is hard to determine which contribution is more important than others, then I agree alphabetical order makes sense. But is it really so in most of the papers? I'm probably biased from being in industry, but even when people contribute unequal code to a module or writing in a report, we just list the authors alphabetically because it's obnoxious to do anything with the list otherwise and it stops a huge amount of politicking when the first three out of ten authors contribute equal amounts. At the end of the day, stable collaborations will outpace individual contributors -- so we should focus on what allows us to openly collaborate and tears down barriers to doing that. But from my point of view, we have a lot of the same incentives between industry and academia: 1. If you want to get promoted, you need projects associated with you and to get noticed. 2. There needs to be some method to decide who gets what amount of bonuses. 3. Funding allocation is tied to past successes. ...and probably some more I'm forgetting. So I think my experience isn't totally irrelevant -- you get enough signal out of the distribution of the person's name that the loss of whatever from not getting "first" information is eclipsed by the gains from less politics (and if you have a lot of documents, easier parsing). Again, perhaps it's the industry talking, but I'd rather hire an author that contributed the third most to a large number of papers than someone who contributed first most to a few. One of them seems to be a "force multiplier" in that they're keeping several other ICs moving (and contributing on all those efforts), while one guy just seems a specialist in a particular work. I don't think removing the "first" signal harms my ability to find those "force multipliers", because they'll still have the same markers (as they weren't showing up first under the other system anyway). So perhaps I simply have different uses for the rankings than people who feel differently?
wbl 9y ago
Littlewood and Hardy disagree. Ranking/attributing contributions to a joint paper in mathematics is very hard especially when the results grow out of conversations between all of the authors.

ansgri 9y ago

In this case, being the last author should matter more. As in, you have a number of first-author publications to prove you can do research yourself, then start publishing as the last author with different first authors, to show you're into management now and can train new first authors. As an old Russian saying goes, 'a great engineer would never be promoted'.