Writing a grant today, I was listing all of my collaborators and noticed something strange. Three of my collaborators last names start with “B”, four with “C”, two with “D” and the only other letter which is duplicated in the rest of my collaborators are two “L”‘s. Basically all my collaborators last names are scrunched towards the front of the alphabet. So the question is: why this is so?
One observation which I don’t think holds for my collaborators is that it may be advantageous in a scientific career to have a last name which is early in the alphabet. Early in the alphabet means you are more likely to be first author, and because there is little standardization about what being first author means, this implies that you will pick up more first authorships than normal. And maybe this counts down the road (here you’re supposed to imagine evil tenure committee’s putting sand on a scale for every first and not first authorship!) But I don’t think it holds for my collaborators: none of us have been working long enough for such selection effects to take us out (as far as I know, that is!)
This reminds me of one of my footnotes which appears in this paper on quant-ph. The authors on the paper are listed as Carlton M. Caves, Christopher A. Fuchs, and Pranaw Rungta, in that order. However there is a footnote
The author ordering on this paper is dictated by CAF’s adherence to alphabetical ordering. CMC, operatoring under equally valid, but less strongly held principles, would have preferred, in this case, inverse alphabetical ordering.
After having read this post and laughed at the footnote, I turned to the arxiv and found the following in the replacements section:
Title: Quantifying the resource of sharing a reference frame
Authors: S.J. van Enk
Comments: Updated title as PRA did not accept the word “refbit” in the title: PRA accepts neither neologisms (=”a meaningless word coined by a psychotic”, according to Webster), nor novophasms
Not sure what a “novophasm” is though.
Here is what I got in response to an email to Steven:
>> What is a novophasm?
>>
>> Is it a neologism for the word neologism?
>
>Most certainly, but you knew that already!
Funny observation. In our weekly group meetings we used to get everyone in the group to say what they had done in the last week, at least that is untill the group got to big and the whole exercise became stupid and boring. So then we switched to having half the group speak each week by splitting the group in half based on alphabetical ordering. We quickly discovered that the first half of the alphabet was over-represented in our group. Instead of splitting the names at “m”, the half-way point of the alphabet, we found that for our group it was a better idea to make the cut at “H”.
I wonder if this is an anomaly, if it is something kinda common in science, or something common to western society??