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Alphabetic or Contributor Author Order. What Is the Norm in Danish Economics and Political Science and Why?
Author(s) -
Henriksen Dorte
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.24151
Subject(s) - norm (philosophy) , politics , order (exchange) , publication , danish , sociology , social science , computer science , epistemology , positive economics , political science , law , linguistics , economics , philosophy , finance
Researchers have different ways of deciding on the author order, and how they do it often depends on the culture of their field. Some fields are well known for using alphabetic author order, while others put a great emphasis on the meaning of the author order and place authors according to contribution. This article is the first to use mixed method to examine the extent of alphabetic author order and to examine why researchers adopt a certain author order norm in the fields of economics and political science. The article finds that alphabetic authorship has been and is the norm in economics, while some tendency towards it exists in political science. The differences in the intellectual and social organization of the fields seem to be a factor in the extent that these researchers will adopt a certain norm. Furthermore, the increasing number of authors per article and the publish‐or‐perish culture seems to put pressure on the alphabetic norm because it creates greater attention to the reputational advantages of being first‐author.