{"id":813,"date":"2005-01-26T06:35:40","date_gmt":"2005-01-26T13:35:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=813"},"modified":"2005-01-26T06:35:40","modified_gmt":"2005-01-26T13:35:40","slug":"alphabet-selection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2005\/01\/26\/alphabet-selection\/","title":{"rendered":"Alphabet Selection"},"content":{"rendered":"

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?
\nOne 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!)
\nThis reminds me of one of my footnotes which appears in this paper<\/a> 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<\/p>\n

\nThe 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.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Alphabet Selection”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}