Cooperation, Coauthorship and Alphabetical Name Ordering

Abstract

Our analysis shows that between 1911 and 1920, 99 per cent of the papers were single-authored, but that number had decreased to only 28 per cent by the 2001–10 period. Today, close to so per cent of contributions are the result of cooperation between two authors, and the number of contributions listing two or more authors has increased, suggesting that division of labour has become more important. In an environment in which cooperation is increasing, it might be asked whether the process of deciding author order could raise issues. Looking at published articles in 1984–8 and 2004–8, we observe that 90.6 per cent of the articles have alphabetical name ordering. However, the probability of non-alphabetical name ordering increases substantially for articles with three or more authors.