Every Author as
First Author

Erik Demaine

Martin Demaine

Erik Demaine

Martin Demaine

M.I.T.

SIGTBD 2023

The Problem: Authorship Order

• Most common order: decreasing significance

• Difficult to measure

• Uncomfortable conversations, arguments, feuds

• What if contributions are roughly equal?

Alphabetical Order

• Make order algorithmic and thus meaningless
• Common in economics, mathematics, and theoretical computer science
• Tenet of supercollaborationBosboom; Demaine; Demaine; Lynch 2018:
  in brainstorming, ideas and failures are as important as successes
• Guarantee contributions are fairly recognized without ever arguing who contributed what

Bias

• Citations in body of paper often “X et al. #”
  for numeric or “(X et al.)” for author/year,
  which gives first author X unequal promotion
  • Recommendation: Write “X, Y, and Z #”
  • Impractical for papers with >10 authors

• Sorting bibliographies alphabetically clusters more by first author, giving unequal promotion

• Above are fundamental limitations of any order

• Alphabetical order judged by fields with decreasing-contribution order

Alphabetical Discrimination

• People with alphabetically earlier surnames are more likely to succeed academicallyWeber 2018

Alternatives: Games

• 25-game croquet seriesHassell; May 1974
• 2-day backgammon contestGodley; May 1977
• Tennis matchGriffiths; Anderson 1978
• Basketball free throwsFauth; Resetarits 1991
• Arm wrestlingShulman; Bermingham 1995
• Brownie bake-offYoung; Young 1992
• A game of chickenRiechert; Hammerstein 1983
• Rock paper scissorsKupfer; Webbeking; Franklin 2004

https://twitter.com/ AndyPurvisNHM/status/ 783326646464045057

Alternatives: Randomness

• Coin tossMiller; Ballard 1992
• Dice rollMandle; Bufford; Schmidt; Daehler 2011
• Outcome of famous cricket gamesO’Hara; Kotze 2010
• Currency exchange rate fluctuation
  Feder; Mitchell-Olds 2003

• Dog treat consumption orderRochman; Brookson; Bikker; Djuric; Earn; Bucci; Athey; Huntington; McIlwraith; Munno; De Frond; Kolomijeca; Erdle; Grbic; Bayoumi; Borrelle; Wu; Santoro; Werbowski; Zhu; Giles; Hamilton; Thaysen; Kaura; Klasios; Ead; Kim; Sherlock; Ho; Hung 2019

https://twitter.com/ChelseaRochman/ status/1110580954253484032

Alternatives: Authors

• HeightMarston; Jones; Woodward 2005
• FertilityOliver; Babcock 1992
• Proximity to tenureRoderick; Gillespie 1998
• Reverse alphabetical order
  Zolensky; Zega; Yano; Wirick; Westphal; Weisberg; Weber; Warren; Velbel; Tsuchiyama; Tsou; Toppani; Tomioka; Tomeoka; Teslich; Taheri; Susini; Stroud; Stephan; Stadermann; Snead; Simon; Simionovici; See; Robert; Rietmeijer; Rao; Perronnet; Papanastassiou; Okudaira; Ohsumi; Ohnishi; Nakamura-Messenger; Nakamura; Mostefaoui; Mikouchi; Meibom; Matrajt; Marcus; Leroux; Lemelle; Le; Lanzirotti; Langenhorst; Krot; Keller; Kearsley; Joswiak; Jacob; Ishii; Harvey; Hagiya; Grossman; Grossman; Graham; Gounelle; Gillet; Genge; Flynn; Ferroir; Fallon; Ebel; Dai; Cordier; Clark; Chi; Butterworth; Brownlee; Bridges; Brennan; Brearley; Bradley; Bleuet; Bland; Bastien 2006
• Degree of belief in the paper’s thesis
  Clark; Chalmers 1998

Our Solution

• New standard for listing authors:

  Superimpose all author names on top of each other (stack)

• Example:

  Erik Demaine & Martin Demaine →

  Erik Demaine; Martin Demaine

• Every author comes first!

• Hybrid for inequal contributions: stack clusters of authors with equal contributions

Independent Discovery

Opacity

• Erik Demaine

  Martin Demaine
  (opacity 1, no transparency)
• Erik Demaine

  Martin Demaine
  (opacity 3/4)
• Erik Demaine

  Martin Demaine
  (opacity 2/3)
• Erik Demaine

  Martin Demaine
  (opacity 1/2)

• Opacity < 1 reveals overlaps and density
• For uniformity, we use opacity 2/3 for all authors
• Future work: Vary opacity by number of authors

Revealing the Names

• Hovering over names pops up original name list
• Copy/paste results in original name list
• Also in PDF compiled from LaTeX

Space Savings

• Credit: Papers with hundreds of authors never cited with all names, even in bibliography
  • J. C. Venter; M. D. Adams; E. W. Myers; P. W. Li; R. J. Mural; G. G. Sutton; H. O. Smith; M. Yandell; C. A. Evans; R. A. Holt; J. D. Gocayne; P. Amanatides; R. M. Ballew; D. H. Huson; J. R. Wortman; Q. Zhang; C. D. Kodira; X. H. Zheng; L. Chen; M. Skupski; G. Subramanian; P. D. Thomas; J. Zhang; G. L. G. Miklos; C. Nelson; S. Broder; A. G. Clark; J. Nadeau; V. A. McKusick; N. Zinder; A. J. Levine; R. J. Roberts; M. Simon; C. Slayman; M. Hunkapiller; R. Bolanos; A. Delcher; I. Dew; D. Fasulo; M. Flanigan; L. Florea; A. Halpern; S. Hannenhalli; S. Kravitz; S. Levy; C. Mobarry; K. Reinert; K. Remington; J. Abu-Threideh; E. Beasley; K. Biddick; V. Bonazzi; R. Brandon; M. Cargill; I. Chandramouliswaran; R. Charlab; K. Chaturvedi; Z. Deng; V. D. Francesco; P. Dunn; K. Eilbeck; C. Evangelista; A. E. Gabrielian; W. Gan; W. Ge; F. Gong; Z. Gu; P. Guan; T. J. Heiman; M. E. Higgins; R. R. Ji; Z. Ke; K. A. Ketchum; Z. Lai; Y. Lei; Z. Li; J. Li; Y. Liang; X. Lin; F. Lu; G. V. Merkulov; N. Milshina; H. M. Moore; A. K. Naik; V. A. Narayan; B. Neelam; D. Nusskern; D. B. Rusch; S. Salzberg; W. Shao; B. Shue; J. Sun; Z. Wang; A. Wang; X. Wang; J. Wang; M. Wei; R. Wides; C. Xiao; C. Yan; A. Yao; J. Ye; M. Zhan; W. Zhang; H. Zhang; Q. Zhao; L. Zheng; F. Zhong; W. Zhong; S. Zhu; S. Zhao; D. Gilbert; S. Baumhueter; G. Spier; C. Carter; A. Cravchik; T. Woodage; F. Ali; H. An; A. Awe; D. Baldwin; H. Baden; M. Barnstead; I. Barrow; K. Beeson; D. Busam; A. Carver; A. Center; M. L. Cheng; L. Curry; S. Danaher; L. Davenport; R. Desilets; S. Dietz; K. Dodson; L. Doup; S. Ferriera; N. Garg; A. Gluecksmann; B. Hart; J. Haynes; C. Haynes; C. Heiner; S. Hladun; D. Hostin; J. Houck; T. Howland; C. Ibegwam; J. Johnson; F. Kalush; L. Kline; S. Koduru; A. Love; F. Mann; D. May; S. McCawley; T. McIntosh; I. McMullen; M. Moy; L. Moy; B. Murphy; K. Nelson; C. Pfannkoch; E. Pratts; V. Puri; H. Qureshi; M. Reardon; R. Rodriguez; Y. H. Rogers; D. Romblad; B. Ruhfel; R. Scott; C. Sitter; M. Smallwood; E. Stewart; R. Strong; E. Suh; R. Thomas; N. N. Tint; S. Tse; C. Vech; G. Wang; J. Wetter; S. Williams; M. Williams; S. Windsor; E. Winn-Deen; K. Wolfe; J. Zaveri; K. Zaveri; J. F. Abril; R. Guigo; M. J. Campbell; K. V. Sjolander; B. Karlak; A. Kejariwal; H. Mi; B. Lazareva; T. Hatton; A. Narechania; K. Diemer; A. Muruganujan; N. Guo; S. Sato; V. Bafna; S. Istrail; R. Lippert; R. Schwartz; B. Walenz; S. Yooseph; D. Allen; A. Basu; J. Baxendale; L. Blick; M. Caminha; J. Carnes-Stine; P. Caulk; Y. H. Chiang; M. Coyne; C. Dahlke; A. D. Mays; M. Dombroski; M. Donnelly; D. Ely; S. Esparham; C. Fosler; H. Gire; S. Glanowski; K. Glasser; A. Glodek; M. Gorokhov; K. Graham; B. Gropman; M. Harris; J. Heil; S. Henderson; J. Hoover; D. Jennings; C. Jordan; J. Jordan; J. Kasha; L. Kagan; C. Kraft; A. Levitsky; M. Lewis; X. Liu; J. Lopez; D. Ma; W. Majoros; J. McDaniel; S. Murphy; M. Newman; T. Nguyen; N. Nguyen; M. Nodell; S. Pan; J. Peck; M. Peterson; W. Rowe; R. Sanders; J. Scott; M. Simpson; T. Smith; A. Sprague; T. Stockwell; R. Turner; E. Venter; M. Wang; M. Wen; D. Wu; M. Wu; A. Xia; A. Zandieh; X. Zhu(274)vs.half a page
• Fairness: Papers with varying number of authors occupy similar space in bibliography

• Effort: Easier to meet page limits
• Efficiency: Less paper and ink

Technology

• LaTeX: \namestack{E. Demaine; M. Demaine}
• BibTeX: fully automatic, including natbib.sty
  

• HTML: <span class="autostack">E. Demaine; M. Demaine</span>(e.g. this talk)

• Open source:
  https://github.com/edemaine/author-stack-paper
  https://github.com/edemaine/author-stack-talk

Technology: LaTeX

• \namestack{Erik Demaine; Martin Demaine}
  → \vbox{\hbox{Erik Demaine}\vskip
    -\baselineskip\hbox{Martin Demaine}}
  →Erik Demaine; Martin Demaine

• Plus:
  • Hover tooltip
  • Copy/paste

• Source code:
  https://github.com/edemaine/author-stack-paper

Technology: BibTeX

• stack-abbrvnat.bst bibliography style
• author automatically stacked in bibliography and natbib.sty author/year citation

• Source code:
  https://github.com/edemaine/author-stack-paper

Technology: HTML

• <span class="autostack">Erik Demaine;
  Martin Demaine</span>→
  <span class="stack" title="Erik Dem...">
  <span class="name">Erik Demaine</span>
  <span class="semi">;</span>
  <span class="name">Martin Dem..</span>
</span>→Erik Demaine; Martin Demaine

• CSS Grid (display: inline-grid) with
  repeated cells (grid-row: 1; grid-column: 1)

• Source code:
  https://github.com/edemaine/author-stack-talk

Future Work: Readability

• Bosboom; Chen; Chung; Compton; Coulombe; Demaine; Demaine; Filho; Hendrickson; Hesterberg; Hsu; Hu; Korten; Luo; Zhang 2020 is hard to read

• One approach: Circle has no first author

Round-Robin Documents

• Signed by authors (such as mutineer sailors) in a circle to prevent identifying ringleader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_(document)

Every Author as
First Author

Erik Demaine

Martin Demaine

M.I.T.

SIGTBD 2023