The A to Z of authorship: analysis of influence of initial letter of surname on order of authorship
BMJ 2001; 323 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.323.7327.1460 (Published 22 December 2001) Cite this as: BMJ 2001;323:1460
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Did the author consider the distribution of last names from the
countries that predominantly publish in the sources used for this
analysis. Possible, last names beginning with A,E,F,G,H,I,H,L,M,P,Y are
more common than the others. It would have been more convincing if the
author had controlled or accounted for prevalence of names starting with
these letters by also describing the distribution of last names that
graduate from university or medical school.
Nancy Risebrough
Competing interests: No competing interests
This is an interesting result but perhaps would have been more
interesting if the authors had looked at the frequency of first letters of
surnames in the populations where the authors were based - perhaps there
are more "M"s in Scotland where there are all those "Mac"s and "Mc"s and
similarly more "O'"s in Ireland ( as in O'Sullivan, etc..)!
Competing interests: No competing interests
The paper of Chambers et al., although in principle interesting, is
not convincing due to the total lack of statistics, which is at least
strange for a BMJ' paper (1).
The paper fails to present sufficient data for claiming that "having a
surname with an initial letter at the beginning rather than the end of the
alphabet seems to be an advantage for order of authorship in papers in the
BMJ". No statistics comparison at all between first and last alphabetic
letters is presented. If they didn't suggest in the text that nine out of
the first 13 letters where more likely to be first authors' initials, the
figure alone didn't get much insight about that, as visual differences
appear to be small.
Furthermore, it should be added that often the last Author has a special
status -head of the laboratory, fundraiser, etc(2,3), although this is
matter of discussion. By ignoring that, however, third Authors which are
also last Authors influence the results.
Finally, I suspect that for Authors from second to last but one, when it
is difficult to establish a specific contributorship order, the alphabetic
order is sometimes used to sort Authors (as occurs usually, for all
Authors, in other scientific disciplines); this might give some trend
inside a random distribution of initials, but it should be still
demonstrated with clear data.
So, yes, someone might change name, but perhaps the authorship order is
simply not really meaningful, in absence of specific rules that tie it to
contributorship order. At the end, the current Vancouver guidelines point
out that readers should infer nothing from the order of authors since
conventions differ (4).
REFERENCES
1) BMJ. Advice to authors and contributors. Statistical methods.
http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/308/6924/283
2) Burman KD. Hanging from the masthead. Ann Intern Med 1982;97:602-5.
3) Bhopal R, Rankin J, McColl E, Thomas L, Kaner E, Stacy R, et al. The
vexed question of authorship: views of researchers in a British medical
faculty. BMJ 1997;314:1009-12.
4) International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Uniform
requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals. Ann Intern
Med 1997;126:34-47.
Competing interests: No competing interests
Higher prevalence of surnames with the first letter in the first half of the alphabet?
While this study of the order of authorship is interesting, thought-
provoking, and potentially very important for some people, the study seems
to be lacking in at least one area.
It has been my observation that surnames, especially those with a
British origin, tend to begin with letters from the first half of the
alphabet. For example, among my colleagues in our research group, surnames
begin with the following letters: A, A, B, C, H, J, K, L, L, L, M, P, R,
R, S, and S (I might also point out that the three authors of this paper
all have surnames beginning with letters from the first half of the
alphabet). According to probability, a random drawing of three of my
colleagues' names to determine the order of authorship would be more
likely to result in the first author having a surname with the first
letter in the first half of the alphabet.
The graph in this paper presents only the percentages of names
without indicating (except for Q and X) what the prevalence was for
surnames beginning with each letter, and thus unfortunately does not allow
us to evaluate whether adjustments are needed. This study could be
enhanced by adjusting the analysis for the higher prevalence of surnames
that begin with first letters from the first half of the alphabet.
Competing interests: No competing interests