3 ms·
There's only two authors! That's so rude!
by marricks 5mo ago
There's only two authors! That's so rude!
- bjourne 5mo agoWhy? For all the automatic academic score tracking systems it doesn't matter one bit if it is Wulf et al. or Wulf and McKee.
- john_strinlai 5mo agoits about respect, not about academic score tracking systems
- mattkrause 5mo agoThe automated ones don't care, but it absolutely matters for the informal credit assignment process that actually runs academia. I really wish we had a better way to "name" papers. Big clinical trials often have an acronym (often hilariously forced: "CXCessoR4"). That takes the emphasis off (one) lead author but it's implausibly hard to make up one for every research paper.
- bjourne 5mo agoWhat "informal credit assignment"? It's automated and it runs entirely on quantitative data.
- remexre 5mo agothe one where i think of a particular piece of work, and i know who did it, then tell a student "oh, see if $author's group published anything else about this." i'm not using software for this if this is off the top of my head, and it's the sort of thing that, at scale, hurts the forgotten author and their students
- bjourne 5mo agoI see. The informal credit assignment process is something that only runs inside of your head.
- ohnei 5mo agoRight, academics who deligate their entire intellectual life to GPT will be unaffected.
- bjourne 5mo agoRight, and everyone else unaware of this made up "informal credit assignment process".
- ohnei 5mo agohttps://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- mattkrause 5mo agoI don’t know that everyone would label it like that, but it’s inarguably true that success in academia comes from your reputation/name recognition. Metrics are often attempts to formalize this but they’re not how most people actually make decisions: nobody is inviting seminar speakers or choosing collaborators because they have a high h-index. If anything, it goes the other way: name recognition gets you invited to speak or collaborate, which makes more people aware of your work, which boosts metrics.
- bjourne 5mo agoThat is false. The first thing everyone (at least everyone in CS---IDK about other fields) looks at are h-indexes, impact factors, number of papers per year, university rankings, and similar metrics. Researchers are most definitely selecting collaborators with a high h-index.
- mattkrause 5mo agoThere’s a cute study demonstrating this effect by comparing career success in economics and psychology. The author lists for economics papers are traditionally alphabetized, so more of your output will be known by your name if it occurs early in the alphabet. Abbie Ableson gets lots of mentions as "Ableson et al." while Zhang Zhu will almost always be relegated to the "et al". If name recognition matters, you’d expect successful academic economists to be clustered at the beginning of the alphabet—-and this appears to be true. In most psychology journals, the author list is instead ordered by contribution/senority, and this effect disappears. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/089533006776526085 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/08953300677652608...
- halJordan 5mo agoSo we're talking about this woman's contribution. And you're talking about how the system is depriving her of recognition. Do you see the inherent tension in what you're claiming vs the lived experience of everyone in this post (including you!)?
- mattkrause 5mo agoCmon…We’re saying that a certain style of reference gives her less credit than might be due. Not none at all. One paper doesn’t make a career (she wrote many dozens), it’s not always cited weirdly, and even if it is, some people may remember the coauthors (as they should). But since you mention lived experience, I’ll add that I’ve certainly been asked if I’m "even aware" of results from co-authored papers where my name was listed second—-and I don’t think this is very uncommon experience.
- setgree 5mo agoIt’s also not correct; et al. is conventionally applied to three or more authors (it means “and others,” plural)